dan davies not in fact talking about a certain bay area subculture:
> As I said in the post before, optimisation rules deduced as part of this model shouldn’t be given a dignified name like “rationality”. And when human behaviour in embodied, contextual situations diverges from the rules of probability and expected utility, this shouldn’t be called “irrationality” without quite a lot of analysis and work aimed at showing that it’s not the probability/expected value model that is at fault.
> Of course, the most obvious piece of evidence that I’m right is that everyone knows that “rationality” often gives absolutely stupid answers when you apply it to problems which involve trust and cooperation. Game theorists do lots of hard work in trying to reconcile the two, but the game is fundamentally a bogey; the point of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commons and all that is that rationality ain’t always very rational.
