The Talks at Google podcast - where great minds meet. Talks at Google brings the world’s most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. Every episode is taken from a video that can be seen at YouTube.com/TalksAtGoogle. DISCLAIMER: The views or opinions expressed by the guest speakers are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Google, Inc. The comments on this channel belong only to the person who posted them. We do, however, reserve the right to remove off-topic or inappropriate comments. Also, the materials presented in the episodes are licensed to Google by the speaker(s). Google does not endorse any products or technology presented by the guest speakers.
http://talksatgoogle.libsyn.com/
episode 385: Jamie Jones | How the Biophysical Environment Shaped Human Preference
Jamie Jones visits Google to discuss the evolution, ecology, and adaptation of the human species.
Rationality has taken a hit recently. Recent work in psychology and economics has challenged the notion that the human brain is designed to make rational decisions. However, this observation raises a paradox. By almost any measure, Homo sapiens is a spectacularly successful species. From humble origins approximately two million years ago, humans have grown to a population that exceeds seven billion and have colonized nearly every terrestrial biome. This phenomenal growth suggests that our ancestors made very good decisions. Yet this work from psychology and economics suggests that the decision-making software that our brains run is profoundly flawed — that we are, in a word, irrational.
How is it possible that a species apparently so defective in its ability to generate sound decisions can be so incredibly successful? It turns out that the rules for a living organism, anchored in the present and subject to a force of selection which is extremely averse to extinction, are quite different from the rules of abstract, formal rationality. In this Talk, Jones will show how the all-important need to avoid extinction in a world that is at best incompletely known has profound implications for preferences, utility, and rationality. By ignoring the condition of existential uncertainty, the theory of rational decision-making has developed distorted expectations of how an organism working in its own best interest should behave.
Originally published in March of 2018.
Visit http://g.co/TalksAtGoogle/HumanPreference to watch the video.