Title: Rationality Enhancement: Towards theories and tools for helping people become more effective

Human judgment and decision-making appear to be riddled with numerous systematic errors. Previous attempts to attenuate these so-called cognitive biases by educating people about them or schooling them in the laws of logic, probability theory, and expected utility theory have had limited success. In this talk, I will outline an alternative approach to improving human rationality that grew out of rethinking what it means to be rational. In the first part of my talk, I will illustrate how making Herbert Simon’s notion of bounded rationality mathematically precise allows us to derive optimal decision strategies from first principles. In the second part of my talk, I will illustrate how such advances can be leveraged to improve human decision-making. Concretely, I will present an intelligent tutor that discovers optimal planning strategies and helps people to internalize those strategies by providing metacognitive feedback.
Finally, in the third part of my talk, I will present a complimentary approach that combines artificial intelligence with gamification to help people become more productive.
 

Dr Falk Lieder, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Host: Dr Elliot Ludvig

3.30pm Refreshments in Common Roon

4pm Talk