You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Lumifer comments on Open Thread March 21 - March 27, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 20 March 2016 07:54PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (160)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 March 2016 03:43:43PM *  5 points [-]

Andrew Gelman mentioned "the Kahneman-Gigerenzer catfight, or more generally the endless debate between those who emphasize irrationality in human decision making and those who emphasize the adaptive and functional qualities of our shortcuts." This looked worth checking, so I followed the link to the following statement by Gigerenzer:

The “half-empty” versus “half-full” explanation of the differences between Kahneman and us misses the essential point: the difference is about the nature of the glass of rationality, not the level of the water. For Kahneman, rationality is logical rationality, defined as some content-free law of logic or probability; for us, it is ecological rationality, loosely speaking, the match between a heuristic and its environment. For ecological rationality, taking into account contextual cues (the environment) is the very essence of rationality, for Kahneman it is a deviation from a logical norm and thus, a deviation from rationality. In Kahneman’s philosophy, simple heuristics could never predict better than rational models; in our research we have shown systematic less-is-more effects.

LW's dog in this catfight is probably on the Kahneman's side, but the debate is interesting.

Comment author: MrMind 24 March 2016 08:30:52AM 1 point [-]

LW's dog in this catfight is probably on the Kahneman's side

Well, probability is about reasoning with logic under imperfect information, and when you factor in the cost of elaboration you see that "ecological" model could be better, but evolution and thermodynamics. I think that simply distinguishing "correct" and "useful" dissolves the debate.

Comment author: Lumifer 24 March 2016 02:34:28PM *  0 points [-]

I think that simply distinguishing "correct" and "useful" dissolves the debate.

No, I think it's more complicated than that.

For example, imagine a complex decision, say what college to go to. Can you write out a Bayesian model that will tell you what to do? Well, kinda. You can, but it's going to be woefully incomplete and involve a lot of guesses without much support from data. A set of heuristics will do much better in this situation. Are you going to say that this Bayesian model is "correct" regardless? I don't think it's a useful application of the word.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 14 April 2016 05:16:51PM 0 points [-]

Not necessarily. "You can't do inference without making assumptions".

Is it even a fight? What is it that they disagree about? Neither side is saying "Decision heuristics that once worked well still work well in our changed world".

Comment author: Lumifer 14 April 2016 05:44:48PM 1 point [-]

Is it even a fight?

It's a fight like a croquet mallet is a billy club :-)

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 14 April 2016 09:20:54PM 0 points [-]

I mean, is there some prediction that they disagree about, rather than 'falling tree sound' issues.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 25 March 2016 04:09:44AM *  0 points [-]

Eh. This is sounding more and more like a dispute over definitions, and hence tedious; and I would be unsurprised to find that it arose from either self-promotion or ideology; q.v. the Gould and Eldredge v. Maynard Smith et al. kerfuffle.

Comment author: username2 23 March 2016 05:47:16PM 0 points [-]

I admit that I don't get the explanation. Wouldn't both approaches lead to the same thing?

Comment author: Lumifer 23 March 2016 07:01:39PM 0 points [-]

The two approaches might but not necessarily will lead you to the same thing. I suspect that part of the tension is between "theoretically correct" and "works better in practice" which in theory should match but in practice do not often enough.

Here is what looks to be the major Gigerenzer paper.

Comment author: SanguineEmpiricist 24 March 2016 09:07:05PM -1 points [-]

Something tells me Gigerenzer is misquoting Kahneman, he is just saying any deviation from that counts as irrational and measuring that as his baseline, i'm more than sure he would be happy to use ecological rationality as a baseline as well.