I don’t think that the fact that Wikipedia has a list of 165 cognitive biases says more about Wikipedia than it says about behavioural economics.
The core idea from Kahnmann is that humans use heuristics to make decisons.
Evolution certainly affected human cognition but most designs for intelligent agents don’t produce intelligent agents. The space of set of heuristics that produce intelligent agents is small. It’s not clear that you can make an intelligent agent of something like a neural net that doesn’t engage in something like the availability heuristic. Confirmation bias isn’t something substantially different than the availability heuristic in action.
When Google’s dreaming neural nets reproduce quirks of the human brain it’s hard to argue that those quirks exit because they provide advantages in sexual competition.
So what does an evolutionary approach tell us about the human mind?
For a start, it tells us something about our objectives.
That’s basically saying Darwin was wrong and his critics who object to organism that don’t evolve according to objectives were right. Darwin wasn’t controversial because he invented evolution. Lamarks already did that decades before Darwin. Darwin was controversial because he proposed to get rid of teleology.
Economics makes errors because it assumes that humans have objectives. You don’t fix that by explaining how humans have different objectives. You fix it by looking at the heuristics of human beings and also studying heuristics of effective decision making in general.
Seems like some people replace the teleological model of “it evolved this way because the Spirit of Nature wanted it to evolve this way” by a simplistic pseudo-evolutionary model of “it evolved because it helps you to survive and get more sex”.
Nope. Some things evolve as side effects of the things that help us “survive and get more sex”; because they are cheaper solutions, or because the random algorithm found them first. There are historical coincidences and path-dependency.
For example, that fact that we have five fingers on each hand doesn’t prove that having five fingers is inherently more sexy or more useful for survival than six or four. Instead, historically, the fish that were our ancestors had five bones in their fins (I hope I remember this correctly), and there was a series of mutations that transformed them into fingers. So, “having fingers” was an advantage over “having no fingers”, but the number five got there by coincidence. Trying to prove that five is the perfect number of fingers would be trying to prove too much.
Analogically, having an imperfect brain was an advantage over having no brain. But many traits of the brain are similar historical artefacts, or design trade-offs, or even historical artefacts of the design trade-offs of our ancestors. A different history could lead to brains with different quirks. Using “neural nets” (as opposed to something else) already is a design decision that brings some artifacts. Having the brain divided into multiple components is another design decision; etc. Each path only proves that going this path was better than not going there; it doesn’t prove that this path is better than all possible alternatives. Some paths could later turn out to be dead ends.
I agree that treating humans as “rational beings with objectives” can be a nice first approximation, but later it’s just adding more epicycles on a fundamentally wrong assumption.
I don’t think that the fact that Wikipedia has a list of 165 cognitive biases says more about Wikipedia than it says about behavioural economics.
The core idea from Kahnmann is that humans use heuristics to make decisons.
Evolution certainly affected human cognition but most designs for intelligent agents don’t produce intelligent agents. The space of set of heuristics that produce intelligent agents is small. It’s not clear that you can make an intelligent agent of something like a neural net that doesn’t engage in something like the availability heuristic. Confirmation bias isn’t something substantially different than the availability heuristic in action.
When Google’s dreaming neural nets reproduce quirks of the human brain it’s hard to argue that those quirks exit because they provide advantages in sexual competition.
That’s basically saying Darwin was wrong and his critics who object to organism that don’t evolve according to objectives were right. Darwin wasn’t controversial because he invented evolution. Lamarks already did that decades before Darwin. Darwin was controversial because he proposed to get rid of teleology.
Economics makes errors because it assumes that humans have objectives. You don’t fix that by explaining how humans have different objectives. You fix it by looking at the heuristics of human beings and also studying heuristics of effective decision making in general.
Seems like some people replace the teleological model of “it evolved this way because the Spirit of Nature wanted it to evolve this way” by a simplistic pseudo-evolutionary model of “it evolved because it helps you to survive and get more sex”.
Nope. Some things evolve as side effects of the things that help us “survive and get more sex”; because they are cheaper solutions, or because the random algorithm found them first. There are historical coincidences and path-dependency.
For example, that fact that we have five fingers on each hand doesn’t prove that having five fingers is inherently more sexy or more useful for survival than six or four. Instead, historically, the fish that were our ancestors had five bones in their fins (I hope I remember this correctly), and there was a series of mutations that transformed them into fingers. So, “having fingers” was an advantage over “having no fingers”, but the number five got there by coincidence. Trying to prove that five is the perfect number of fingers would be trying to prove too much.
Analogically, having an imperfect brain was an advantage over having no brain. But many traits of the brain are similar historical artefacts, or design trade-offs, or even historical artefacts of the design trade-offs of our ancestors. A different history could lead to brains with different quirks. Using “neural nets” (as opposed to something else) already is a design decision that brings some artifacts. Having the brain divided into multiple components is another design decision; etc. Each path only proves that going this path was better than not going there; it doesn’t prove that this path is better than all possible alternatives. Some paths could later turn out to be dead ends.
I agree that treating humans as “rational beings with objectives” can be a nice first approximation, but later it’s just adding more epicycles on a fundamentally wrong assumption.