In this Issue

When I was contacted to write this essay (or rather, when I was reminded it was due) there were two particular thoughts ping-ponging around my head. The first was a recent re-read of Gerd Gigerenzer’s Rationality for Mortals: Risk and Rules of Thumb, a work that features heavily in the essay and forms the basis of the title. Gigerenzer’s point in the book is that the methods we elevate as “deep analysis” are often profoundly unsuited to the real-world environments we practice such skills in, where “less can be more.” The second was something that had just occurred. A student had come up after a presentation. Asked what they valued from it, her answer was that I had said at one point that they could stop after a short analysis and decide that would be enough. This seemed shocking to her, but also comforting.

Here’s the thing: Her comment was not unusual in the slightest. I’ve heard that relieved shock from students in my classes, from faculty in my workshops, from reporters when I’ve provided interviews. As one New York Times columnist told me, “It makes sense, but it feels so wrong.” It’s such a common reaction, I usually don’t even notice it anymore. But that day, under pressure for an idea and with the Gigerenzer book in front of me, it occurred to me I should get these observations down in print, and a “provocations” essay might be the place to do it.

Initially, I tried to approach the essay from a very theoretical angle. The Gigerenzer discussion stayed in, the student comment did not. I think an early draft referenced various perceptual studies of the 1950s, some cognitive theory about peer influence, and various other papers. But over the course of revisions and editorial comments I realized the core of what I valued in the essay was this odd bundle of observations less tied together by argument than an overriding theme: That we tacitly encourage the performance of “studentness” in the classroom — assuming it to be an idealized, infinitely applicable problem-solving approach of which everything else is some degraded version, and that this is not serving our students well.

In my mind, it’s this idea that ties the essay together. Despite knowing (as with the mortgage example I use in the essay) that taking a more academic approach to problem-solving can be fraught, despite seeing that engaging in longer investigations without sufficient domain knowledge increases the chance of falling down a rabbit hole, despite awareness of the fact that world-class researchers fall for misinformation just like first-year students do – despite all this, we cling to the idea that the solution is to give the student some toy model of the sort of analytical tools we use in academe. And we do this even when a better point might be to start with student understandings of social reputation (one of the main aspects of adolescent social development), and to increase their comfort with simpler, more effective solutions.

Perhaps too late in the editing process I realized the essay was not really about Gigerenzer, but about the student comment. More precisely, it was about that moment of student relief, the transgressive joy in hearing the answer to a problem might not be more studentness after all.