Book Review

I've just finished reading Keith E. Stanovich's excellent introductory text to rationality Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World

I learnt a lot more than I thought I would, which is always a happy surprise.

It introduced to me two views of rationality: instrumental (what to do) and epistemic (what is true). I discovered that there is a Great Debate about human rationality and it appears to be very important indeed.

Big Data can make us Big Dumb or Big Brilliant and it seems to me that how we approach our rationality will play a big part in that.

I can seem immediate applications of this book in the analytics industry (especially for business leaders) and in the strategy field.

Critically the book urges us to take much more care in what we believe to be true and that our first response to something is problematic in any domain that is undergoing rapid contextual change.

To summarise this review, I'm going to write a quatrain in the style of a Persian Ruba'i:

To be rational is to figure out what is true and what to do
Truth is something to construct and construe
We debate thin and broad, Melior and Pangloss
But it is the metarational that enriches our world view