Ecological rationality

"'More information is always better, and full information is best. More computation is always better, and optimization is best.' More-is-better ideals such as these have long shaped our vision of rationality. Yet humans and other animals typically rely on simple heuristics to solve adaptive problems, focusing on one or a few important cues and ignoring the rest, and shortcutting computation rather than striving for as much as possible. In this book, we argue that in an uncertain world, more information and computation are not always better, and we ask when, and why, less can be more. The…