Five - Decision-Making – Choosing What Is Most Likely to Give You What You Most Want

Summary

In his book Calculated Risks, decision-making expert Gerd Gigerenzer reports the case of a doctor who convinced ninety “high-risk” women without cancer to sacrifice their breasts “in a heroic exchange for the certainty of saving their lives and protecting their loved ones from suffering and loss.” But as Gigerenzer points out, if the doctor had done the calculations correctly, he would have found that the vast majority of these women (eighty-four out of ninety, to be precise) were not expected to develop breast cancer at all.

Was this an isolated case of poor reasoning on the part of a single doctor? Unfortunately, the answer is no, as is plainly apparent in the ongoing controversies surrounding breast cancer and prostate cancer screening.