When You're Too Rational to Be Rational!

Update: 2018-11-16

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Are humans rational? What would that even mean? Does it mean we follow the laws of formal logic, or does it mean we only care about getting a positive end result? Some modern psychologists, often in the vein of the Heuristics and Biases Program (à la Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky) often implicitly assume that these are the same thing, that humans are often gravely miscalibrated in our sense of reason. We are logically broken. Some, proponents of Libertarian Paternalism, propose that this illogicalness should be actively mitigated by governmental policy and Nudging (see Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's book Nudge).

But another line of thought, Ecological Rationality holds that what seems "irrational" about human behavior is only an artifact of when we fail to look at our decision-making in improper circumstances in the laboratory. What aspects of our psychology seem irrational are often mechanisms based in the wisdom of real-life risk, and far more trust-worthy than the recommendations of psychologists and behavioral economists. Sometimes even, our irrational mind is much smarter than we are.

Readings and Links

Note that pay-walled academic articles may be obtained by feeding their URLs to sites like Sci-Hub.

Rationality for Mortals (Gerd Gigerenzer)
Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
Nudge (Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein)
What Darwin Got Wrong (Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini)
"Libertarian Paternalism" (Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein)
Environments That Make Us Smart: Ecological Rationality (Peter Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer)

Timecodes

00:00 	Rationality for Big-Braned Mortals
03:12 	The Heuristics and Biases Program and System 1 and System 2 in Psychology
07:12 	Experimentations in Human Irrationality and Cognitive Illusions, the Baseball Bat example
10:05 	On 250% Chances
12:16 	Priming, framing and making money selling washing machines
15:27 	Biases, risks and the Hard-Easy effect
17:32 	A summary of Kahneman and Tversky's program
18:55 	I know this model isn't real... implicatures and Linda the feminist bank-teller
25:23 	Donations (https://donate.notrelated.xyz)
27:58 	tfw when too rational to be rational??? Seeds of doubt
29:05 	Formally rational vs. rational in the real world
31:14 	Ecological Rationality and the Adaptive Toolbox
33:51 	Formal logic is for autistes and NPCs
37:33 	Reconstructing human rationality in the light of uncertainty, Black Swans
40:37 	Returning to the Hard-Easy effect and regression to the epistemological mean
41:43 	The ploy of Heuristics and Biases program
42:39 	Richard Dawkins plays basebal with the gaze heuristic.
45:34 	The border between Systems 1 and 2 and the Paradox of Choice and overfitting
50:23 	Feyerabend vs. Gould
53:11 	Core assumptions
54:03 	What Darwin Got Wrong in the Heuristics and Biases program and emergence
58:50 	Libertarian Paternalism and Nudgebois, social engineering and inevitable ignorance
1:04:11 	Closing