BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:The Most Rational People in the World - James Holland Jones (Stanf
 ord University &amp\; Imperial College)
DTSTART:20170531T153000Z
DTEND:20170531T163000Z
UID:TALK72281@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ann Van Baelen
DESCRIPTION:Rationality has taken a hit recently. A veritable torrent of w
 ork – both technical and popular – in psychology and economics has cha
 llenged the notion that the human brain is designed to make rational decis
 ions. However\, this observation raises a paradox. By almost any measure\,
  Homo sapiens is a spectacularly successful species. From humble origins a
 pproximately two million years ago\, humans have grown to a population tha
 t exceeds seven billion and have colonized – and come to dominate – ne
 arly every terrestrial biome. This phenomenal growth suggests that\, on av
 erage\, our ancestors made very good decisions. Yet this work from psychol
 ogy and economics suggests that the decision-making software that our brai
 ns run is profoundly flawed — that we are\, in a word\, irrational. How 
 is it possible that a species apparently so defective in its ability to ge
 nerate sound decisions can be so incredibly successful?\n\nHumans are biol
 ogical entities and\, as such\, we are subject to the laws of evolution. W
 hen the rules for rational decision-making were discovered and formalized\
 , however\, this fact was ignored. It turns out that the rules for a livin
 g organism\, anchored in the present and subject to a force of selection w
 hich is extremely averse to extinction\, are quite different from the rule
 s of abstract\, formal rationality. I will show how the all-important need
  to avoid extinction in a world that is at best incompletely known has pro
 found implications for preferences\, utility\, and rationality. By ignorin
 g the condition of existential uncertainty\, the theory of rational decisi
 on-making has developed distorted expectations of how an organism working 
 in its own best interest should behave. \n\nI work through how an evolutio
 nary perspective on decision-making changes our interpretations of two exa
 mples from the canon of human fallibility\, namely\, time-inconsistent pre
 ferences and non-probabilistic weighting of decisions. What we see is that
  uncertainty\, in fact\, favors what has come to be generally known (albei
 t incorrectly) as ‘hyperbolic discounting.’ Even if the decision-maker
  has a foundation of consistent preferences\, the existence of uncertainty
  means that the best decision-making policy will favor earlier payoffs and
  be more indifferent to time delays later on. In other words\, optimal tim
 e preferences in the presence of uncertainty look an awful lot like the dr
 eaded irrational time-inconsistency. I then discuss work in which we have 
 shown that (evolutionary) fitness maximizing agents will show the type of 
 putatively irrational weighting of risky decisions that Kahneman and Tvers
 ky famously discuss in their work on Prospect Theory.\n
LOCATION:BioAnth Lecture Theatre (Room 41)\, Division of Biological Anthro
 pology\, Pembroke Street\, Cambridge\, CB2 3QG
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR