Knowing and Making

The Geary behavioural blog explores some research from Garth Brooks into time discounting and uncertain preferences. Who knew he had a second career in economics? But he evidently does: Garth has proved his credentials as a behavioural economist by not writing down an actual model for his theories; instead, he just tells an anecdote and we're meant to make our own inferences. He'd fit in just fine in J.Econ.Psych. Multitaskers are bad at... multitasking, according to the BBC . In my own model of the mind, this is one of the key factors that accounts for much of the behaviour we see in experiments. In complex situations, to rationally optimise for the ideal outcome requires us to near-simultaneously adjust and monitor several different variables. In reality cognitive limits prevent us from doing this, so we either miss opportunities to optimise, or we use heuristics which combine multiple variables into one (and that can only be an approximation). In this context, heuristics m...