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Is true love just a click away? -- What AI is best at : the stable-world principle -- Machines influence how we think of intelligence -- Are self-driving cars just down the road? -- Common sense AI -- One data point can beat big data -- Transparency -- Sleepwalking into surveillance -- The psychology of getting users hooked -- Safety and self-control -- Fact or fake?

Gigerenzer is one of the researchers of behavioral intuition responsible for the science behind Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink. Gladwell showed how snap decisions often yield better results than careful analysis. Now, Gigerenzer explains why intuition is such a powerful decision-making tool. Drawing on a decade of research, Gigerenzer demonstrates that gut feelings are actually the result of unconscious mental processes--processes that apply rules of thumb that we've derived from our environment and prior experiences. The value of these rules lies precisely in their difference from rational analysis--they take into account only the most useful bits of information rather than attempting to evaluate all possible factors. By examining various decisions we make, Gigerenzer shows how gut feelings not only lead to good practical decisions, but also underlie the moral choices that make our society function.--From publisher description

The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but in dramatically different disciplinary and h

AbstractAxiomatic rationality is defined in terms of conformity to abstract axioms. Savage (The foundations of statistics, Wiley, New York, 1954) limited axiomatic rationality to small worlds (S, C), that is, situations in which the exhaustive and mutually exclusive set of future states S and their consequences C are known. Others have interpreted axiomatic rationality as a categorical norm for how human beings should reason, arguing in addition that violations would lead to real costs such as money pumps. Yet a review of the literature shows little evidence that violations are actually associated with any measurable costs. Limiting axiomatic rationality to small worlds, I propose a naturalized version of rationality for situations of intractability and uncertainty (as opposed to risk), all of which are not in (S, C). In these situations, humans can achieve their goals by relying on heuristics that may violate axiomatic rationality. The study of ecological rationality requires formal models of heuristics and an analysis of the structures of environments these can exploit. It lays the foundation of a moderate naturalism in epistemology, providing statements about heuristics we should use in a given situation. Unlike axiomatic rationality, ecological rationality can explain less-is-more effects (when using less information can be expected to generate more accurate predictions), formalize when one should move from 'is' to 'ought,' and be evaluated by goals beyond coherence, such as predictive accuracy, frugality, and efficiency. Ecological rationality can be seen as a formalization of means–end instrumentalist rationality, based on Herbert Simon's insight that rational behavior is a function of the mind and its environment.

A low‐probability, high‐damage event in which many people are killed at one point of time is called adread risk. Dread risks can cause direct damage and, in addition, indirect damage mediated though the minds of citizens. I analyze the behavioral reactions of Americans to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and provide evidence for the dread hypothesis: (i) Americans reduced their air travel after the attack; (ii) for a period of one year following the attacks, interstate highway travel increased, suggesting that a proportion of those who did not fly instead drove to their destination; and (iii) for the same period, in each month the number of fatal highway crashes exceeded the base line of the previous years. An estimated 1,500 Americans died on the road in the attempt to avoid the fate of the passengers who were killed in the four fatal flights.