rationality - Concepts

Explore concepts tagged with "rationality"

Total concepts: 23

Concepts

Sunk Cost Fallacy - Continuing investments due to past costs that cannot be recovered.
Backward Induction - A reasoning method in sequential games where players think ahead to the final outcome and work backwards to determine optimal strategy at each decision point.
Cognitive Biases - Systematic patterns of deviation from rationality in judgment, arising from mental shortcuts that are efficient but can lead to predictable errors.
Evidence-Based Thinking - The disciplined practice of forming beliefs and making decisions based on the best available evidence rather than intuition, tradition, or authority.
Calibration - The alignment between confidence in one's judgments and actual accuracy, reflecting how well subjective certainty matches objective correctness.
Sunk Benefit - A benefit already received from a past decision that, like sunk costs, should not influence future decisions since it cannot be un-received or returned.
Dominant Strategy - A strategy in game theory that yields a better outcome for a player regardless of what other players choose to do.
Expected Value - A probability-weighted average of all possible outcomes used to make rational decisions under uncertainty.
Fast and Frugal Heuristics - Simple decision rules that use minimal information yet often outperform complex analysis in uncertain environments.
Probabilistic Thinking - Thinking in terms of likelihoods rather than certainties to make better decisions.
Humanism - A philosophical stance emphasizing human agency, reason, and welfare as the basis for ethics and meaning without appeal to supernatural authority.
Reach of Explanations - The extent to which a good explanation applies beyond the phenomena it was originally designed to explain.
Marginal Thinking - The economic principle of making decisions based on the additional cost or benefit of one more unit rather than on total or average costs and benefits.
Take-the-Best Heuristic - A fast and frugal decision-making strategy that bases judgments on only the single most important differentiating cue between options.
Sunk Cost - A cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered, regardless of any future actions or decisions.
Critical Rationalism - Karl Popper's epistemology holding that knowledge grows through bold conjectures subjected to rigorous criticism and empirical testing, never by proof or induction.
Belief Revision - The process of changing one's beliefs when confronted with new evidence that contradicts prior assumptions.
Bold Conjectures - Karl Popper's idea that scientific progress comes from risky, high-content hypotheses that forbid much and could easily be wrong.
Bygones Principle - The economic principle that rational decision-makers should ignore sunk costs and base decisions only on future costs and benefits.
Hard-to-Vary Explanations - David Deutsch's criterion for good explanations: every detail plays a functional role so the account cannot be easily modified without ruining its explanatory power.
Epistemic Rationality - The systematic pursuit of accurate beliefs through evidence, reason, and willingness to update one's views.
Expected Utility Theory - The standard economic model of rational decision-making under uncertainty, where agents choose options that maximize expected utility.
Debiasing - Strategies and techniques designed to reduce or eliminate the impact of cognitive biases on judgment and decision-making.

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