p.57"Ecological rationality refers to the study of how
cognitive strategies exploit the representation and structure of information in the environment to make reasonable judgments
and decisions. The importance of studying the link between mind and its environment was emphasized by Egon Brunswik, who compared mind
and environment to two married people who have to come to terms with each other by mutual adaptation... More recently,
Roger Shepard (1990, p.213) expressed the same insight: 'We may look into that window [on the mind] as through a glass
darkly, but what we are beginning to discern there looks very much like a reflection of the world.' "
Gigerenzer uses Herbert Simon's metaphor of a pair of scissors to describe the match between
cognitive strategies and the environment:
p.111"To understand the power of human intelligence, one needs to analyze the match between cognitive
strategies and the structure of environments. Together they are like a pair of scissors, each blade of little use on its own
but effective in concert with the other... How do people make decisions in the real world, where time is short, knowledge
lacking, and other resources limited? ...By analyzing the match between heuristic and environment, we can predict how fast,
frugal, and accurate a heuristic will be."
Can a machine be rational? A better question might be, how can we leverage the machine's capabilities
with the information cues present in the environment, in a way that produces measurable results:
p.168"What are these simple, intelligent heuristics capable of making near-optimal inferences? How
fast and accurate are they? In this chapter, we propose a class of heuristics that exhibit bounded rationality in both of
[American social scientist Herbert] Simon's senses. These 'fast and frugal heuristics' operate with simple psychological principles
that satisfy the constraints of limited time, knowledge, and computational might, rather than those of classical rationality.
At the same time, they are designed to be fast and frugal without a significant loss of inferential accuracy, because they
can exploit the structure of environments."
