Overview

How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality-and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment In the 1940s, mathematicians set out to design computers that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. The Irrational Decision tells the story of how they settled on a peculiar mathematical definition of rationality in which every decision is a statistical question of risk. Benjamin Recht traces how this quantitative standard came to define our understanding of rationality, looking at the history of optimization, game theory, statistical testing, and machine learning. He explains why, now more than ever, we need to resist efforts by powerful tech interests to drive public policy and essentially rule our lives. While mathematical rationality has proven valuable in accelerating computers, regulating pharmaceuticals, and deploying electronic commerce, it fails to solve messy human problems and has given rise to a view of a rational world that is not only overquantified but surprisingly limited. Recht shows how these mathematical methods emerged from wartime research and influenced fields ranging from economics to health care, drawing on illuminating examples ranging from diet planning to chess to self-driving cars. Highlighting both the power and limitations of mathematical rationality, The Irrational Decision reveals why only humans can resolve fundamentally political or value-based questions and proposes a more expansive approach to decision making that is appropriately supported by computational tools yet firmly rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment.

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9780691272443

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Reviews

""Clear, authoritative, easy to follow, and full of quotable phrases about the folly of giving optimizers and computers the power to govern our lives.""---Jathan Sadowski, Critical AI ""The Irrational Decision is not a polemic against mathematical rationality in all of its forms, but instead a more precise strike against the dominance of the rational worldview. Recht’s argument, at its core, is that mathematical rationality has become an overextended tool, a hammer asked to not just hammer nails but turn screws and saw boards as well.""---Jacob Sujin Kuppermann, Reboot

Author Information

Benjamin Recht is professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author (with Stephen J. Wright) of Optimization for Data Analysis and (with Moritz Hardt) Patterns, Predictions, and Actions: Foundations of Machine Learning (Princeton).

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