Miscellaneous
Colloquium Mathematical Philosophy, Gregory Wheeler (MCMP) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (25 June, 2014) titled "Fast, Frugal and Focused: When less information leads to better decisions". Abstract: People frequently do not abide by the total evidence norm of classical Bayesian rationality but instead use just a few items of information among the many available to them. Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues have famously shown that decision-making with less information often leads to objectively better outcomes, which raises an intriguing normative question: if we could say precisely under what circumstances this "less is more" effect occurs, we conceivably could say when people should reason the Fast and Frugal way rather than the classical Bayesian way. In this talk I report on results from joint work with Konstantinos Katsikopoulos that resolves a puzzle in the mathematical psychology literature over attempts to to explain the conditions responsible for this "less is more" effect. What is more, there is a surprisingly deep connection between the "less is more" effect and coherentist justification. In short, the conditions that are good for coherentism are lousy for single-reason strategies, and vice versa.