Heuristics are Mental Shortcuts that are part of a Context-Dependent-“Toolbox” that is aquired during a process of Formal Training and Experimenting by Trial and Error where people learn from their own Mistakes (Experience) and the Compressed Narratives of the Mistakes of Others (Wisdom)..
Heuristics are able to improves many Practises in Healthcare and other places where Specialists play an important role.
Beside the (1): the Mind, Equality,
(2): the Senses, Looking Outside,Facing the Facts, Intensity,
(3): the Emotions (Evaluate), Together,
(4) the Intuition Predicting, Looking Inside, Insight,Uniqueness,
(5) the Consciousness, the Observer
play a role.
They work together in a Cyclic Path of Change controlled by two Complementary variables called Agency and Communion where Agency is the pursuit of individuality through power and control; and Communion is the participation in a large organism through care and contact.
Ecological (Context dependent) Rationality shows that Complex problems are not solved by complex solutions and The best Fitting Model is the worst Predictor.
Examples of a Bias are: Availability(the Amount of ~Examples we have ready in mind), Representativeness (the many Prototypes we know that Look Like the Situation we are in), and Base-Line (the Statistics we know in our own Context).
0. Reading list
- Introduction: I received a PDF from Simon Kolin that explains the theory he used to create software to use Heuristics in Stock Trading.
2. What is Rationality? Why we have to use logic to find the Truth and the introduction of a simple heuristic called the Svara.
3. The Geometry behind Rationality. When we make a structured picture we get Oversight.
4. Bounded Rationality The rules to be succesful in being Rational.
5. Examples of the many Geometries of Rationality and the Patterns Behind the Patterns.
6. Philosophers about Rationality, About Meta-heuristics and The Insights of many Deep Thinkers.
7. Behaviorial Economics We are driven by the Human Bias.
8. Ecological Rationality If we know Bias, Variance and Noise we can find simple patterns.
9. Metabletics: Metabletics provide a uniquely interdisciplinary approach through the analysis of simultaneous events to identify patterns in human experience.
10. Choice Architecture With the help of the four “organs” of the Brain it is possible to Manipulate.
12. Conclusion
Appendix: . 2PDF’s about Ecological Rationality
13. New Research about Heuristics and the relation with Artificial Intelligence
1. Introduction
It all started with the two PDF’s I received from Simon Kolin that are now at the end of this blog that are about Ecological Rationality.
He send them to explain his new Company (STT) that is using Heuristics in Stock Trading.
The Articles are from Gerd Gigerenzer of the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
After reading the PDF’s I decided to put them in a new blog and relate them to the things I believe I know.
When you want to read a resume of the two PDF’s in Chapter 8 use this link.
2.0 What is Rationality?
The pattern was called the Breathing of the Universe, Svara in Sanskrit (Krit=Practice), Sans=Sound.
Sanskrit is a ancient constructed language just like Chinese.
The svara is a Rythmic combination of Expansion and Compression triggered by the Fire of the Passion to understand.
PoC is a Quaternion, a Fourfold pattern where all the parts are Complementary.
In the picture you can recognize the Drum (Rhythm, Blue), the Fire (Red) of Passion, the Knee of the Elephant (Green, Motivation, Emotion) and the Pushing Hand of the Will (Yellow).
A definition of a Concept Expands.
As an Example look at the The definition of Rationality in Wikipedia . (“based on or agreeable to reason“) It Expands in many more terms:
(“the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth“).
To define a term you can use a simple Framework in which you connect nouns (static) and verbs (Dynamic).
A noun is a Transformation of a dynamic (verb) into a static (noun).
You can compare this with a Movie (verb) and a Picture (noun).
In essence Everything is Moving.
When you look at the definition you wiil see that the basic frame of rationality is that something (It) or somebody (I) is “applying logic” with an input of information and an output of conclusions.
2.1 What is a Worldview (Perspective, Point of View)?
A worldview is “the fundamental cognitive Orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual’s or society’s knowledge“.
In this defintion there are (again) two parts Orientation and Individual (I) grouped in We (Society), You (not Me),they (not we) and It (Not me,not You,Not They, Not We) being a Concept.
Knowledge is an abstraction of Experience and experience is created when we learn from Mistakes.
The higher we abstract the simpler te world becomes and the bigger the mistakes that are made.
Big mistakes called a disaster come in cycles. Our ancestors build big Early Warming Systems hoping we wiil see the Signs.
2.2 What is a Distinction?
A Distiction is a “Recognition of a difference“.
I, the Observer defines and makes distinctions where the first Distinction is Not a Distinction but a recognition of the difference between Oneness and not-Oneness or the Diversity of the Many different Ones or the recognition of a movement between one and not one named a Negation of where a negation is a Rotation.
3. The Pattern behind the Worldviews
The Trinity (<-1+ 1->=3)
A Distinction generates two parts + the distinction itself making three parts, the Trinity.
The number of perspectives is bigger than a power of two because you have to include all the relations between the perpectives. A picture of all the relations is a Geometry.
The Fibonacci Heuristic
This geometry can be explained by a simple sequence called the Bronze Mean. The Bronze mean was known by Plato.
It is a generalization of the sequence of Fibonacci that is generated with the formula:
where F0= 0 and F(1) =1 and n>1.
The formula again contains three parts where n-1 is in the Middle.
When you write down the sequence as a Continued Fraction the Golden Ratio Fn/Fn−1 contains only 1′‘s.while the Bronze Mean only contains 3’s (Triangels).
The sequence shows that the Future is the sum of the Past.
4. Bounded Rationality
The study of Unbounded rationality assumes that Rational decision makers will collect and evaluate all information, weight each piece of it according to some criterion, and then combine the pieces to maximize the chances of attaining their goals.
In practice humans and computers don’t have the time and the capacity (in terms of Memory and processing power) to calculate the best Alternative.
The Best becomes often the Worst when we know what Events really have happened and we detect what data was missed.
It is proven that the Best model generates the Worst predictions.
Smart Systems were build to solve this problem by introducing a new type of statistics (AI) and even new types of computers based on quantum mechanics but some heuritics beat them all.
This all has to do with the Reason (Why), Processes(How), and their participants (Who) and the Environment(Where) where the Decisons (What) take place. Thats why this Rationality is called Ecological.
Behind this all we can find many Cycles in cycles in cycles (Spirals) that explain the Spirit of the Time and the interaction with the Genius Loci that Mikhael Bahktin called the Chronotope, the generator of Narratives that move up into abstraction until they appear as a Law of the Universe.
He uses the Failures of smart people that fail by using Unbounded Rationality to create a Tension between good and bad approaches. Good and Bad are the subject of Ethics.
5. The Geometries Behind Rationality
The amount of perspectives on Rationality is a Power of Two when we start with the Distinction between Rational and not Rational.
1->2 <-> : Dualism: Rational vs Irrational
In Dualism there is only one choice between two complementary categories Rational and Not-Rational (“Emotional“?).
The basic pattern is Expansion vs Contraction with a middle being a Point called a Singularity or Bindu in Sanskrit.
Expansion is often called Male and Compression Female or Yang and Yin in Chinese or 0 and 1 (bits) in a Computer.
Besides counting you can also make a choice in a computer and define activities. Im this case the computer has to be connected with a mechanical device.The first computer was a Spinning Wheel.
In current Psychlogy yin and yang are are called Communion and Agency.
The combination <-.-> is represented by an iron Spring or a (golden?) Ring (=Cycle).
4= (2<->) x (2<->) : Four Gates, the Quaternion of Carl Jung, Archetypes are Dual Oppositions
There are Four (2×2) connected (Dual) Perspectives now called Archetypes when we look at the Quaternion of Jung.
But 2×2 = also 1+ 3×1 which is the rule of the so called Metallic Mean also known as the Golden Ratio.
the rule is X (n) is kx X(n-1) + (X-2) where x(0) = 1 and n>1 and k=1,2,3,…k=1 is the Golden mean and k=3 is called the Bronze mean. There are more “metallic” means.
Next to Thinking and Feeling, Intuition(In-sight and Sensing (Out-Sight),Facing the Facts) are defined.
Thinking = Rational, Feeling = Not- Rational and Intuitive = In-Sight and Sensing=Out-Sight being the two complements of Seeing. Eye and not-Eye, In vs Out are two Horizontal Directions. and Thinking moving Up and Down creating a Cycle.
Alchemy: a Circle contains Infinite Points of View
In Alchemy you have found the Holy Grail when you have turned the Square in a Circle and have detected that History Repeats itself.
Pattern: the Bronze Mean and the Sequence of Fibonacci
The pattern (1,1,4,13,43) behind the many Points of View is related to a generalization the of sequence of Fibonacci (Golden Mean) based on the Trinity and called the Bronze Mean. We are now on Level 43 called the Sri Yantra.
13= 3×4+1: Zodiac, Apostles, Knights, Connecting the Square to The Cross
It can be found in The Zodiac with the Sun in the Middle of the Cross, The 12 Apostles with Jezus (The Sun of the Sun (= Saturn) at the Cross. Saturn is represented by the Cube of Space (the Kaaba).
43= 3×13 + 4 : Sri Yantra
6: Hexagon:
The two Triangels relate to the Upper and Lower Bloodcirculation with the Pumping (Rhythm) Heart in the Middle.
The cycle is closed by the Snake (
Ouroboros) of the Kundalini (“Life Energy”).
8: Cube of Time and Space:
Theory vs Practice
If we stop with defining more categories we could also look at the way Successful humans operate.
Making a Choice
This blog is about Ecological Rationality although it takes the context (the Ecology?) as an important Variable to consider.
Herbert Simon started the a field of research he called “Decision making”). He came up with de term Satisficing (satisfy and sufficient) behavior.
Satificing is a Tension (Bisocation) between two related concepts Satify and Sufficient.
6. Rational Philosophers are Trying to find The Theory that Explains Everything
why finding an essence is a bias ;
A Theory is a” rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon,” where abstracting is a way to make things simpler by compression .
The most interesting way to make things simpler is to detect a simple Repeating pattern (a fractal or self-reference).
Explain contains the term Plane meaning a Rectangular (2D) frame we use to see the 3D outside world using Perspective drawing.
An interesting type of a plane is a scape.
John Wheeler: We are Observing the Observer
Nassim Taleb: Antifragility: How to Benefit from Disorder
Nassim Taleb is an expert in risk and investing. He was a dealer. About one of his books called Anti-Fragility meaning Not-Fragile I gave a presentatation and wrote a blog about the presentation.
You are anti-fragile when you are a diversity, an ecology that is changing according to the cycle of panarchy. The Panarchy Cycle is a Moebius Ring.
The control variables are:
(1):Connectedness, the way the parts of the Ecology are connected. An Ecology is going down when the parts are too connected meaning they could brake (fragile).
(2): Potential is the amount of Energy (from the Sun, in the Soil,..) available and
(3): Resilience is the way an ecology reacts when a major Event (Calamity) happens. A Healthy Ecology Bounces Back.
The model behind Resilience is a String.
A string is a strongly connected Spiral that is able to Expand and Contract because of the Tension between the Beginning and the End <->.
Arthur Koestler: Thinking with our Body
In 1964 Arthur Koestler wrote the Act of Creation.
He defined creation as a fusion of two separate mostly contradictional, Frames of Reference, he called bisociation.
Much later (2002) Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner (The Way We Think) called the principle of “bisociation” Conceptual Blending.
They worked together with George Lakoff who named the frames of reference Metaphors (“Mappings” and found out that we think with our Body (“Embodiment”). and not with our brain.
The Body moves trough stages that shape the mind.
That’s why Standing up makes Up (High) much more important than Low with our feet On the Ground and Crawling getting somewhere, an Experimental way to get there is valued much lower than Walking.
Mikhael Bhaktin: Being In the Context
The Russian Philosopher Mikhael Bahktin stated that Code (Structuring) is a deliberately killed Context meaning that you have to watch out that “the Map does not become the Territory“.
““A context is potentially unfinalized; a code must be finalized. A code is only a technical means of transmitting information; it does not have cognitive, creative significance. Code is deliberately killed context“.
: ““We have to face problems of reality and human potential, problems of freedom and necessity, and the problem of creative initiative“.
“Our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others”
Keep your feet on the ground and look around when you walk and don’t abstract everything away with a simple model that explains everything and always listen to and Reflect about the observation of others.
Albert Borgman: The Device Paradigm: Experiencing
The Device paradigm of the American philosopher Albert Borgman states that “it is a general trend of technological development that mechanisms (devices) are increasingly hidden behind service interfaces.
We see what the tool shows because it has a build in theory.
We are loosing our connection with nature which makes it easy to use it as a tool to reach our own goals.
We, the Hawks are estroying the Doves because they are an easy target.
Alain Fiske’s Relational Theory.
MP_Market pricing is the Dominant Model in the Western World and is also named Capitalism. We are moving to a dominant Yellow (EM) state (“Always Restore the Balance in a Relation”.
7. Daniel Kahneman: Behavioral Economics
In may 2009 I wrote a blog about Behavioral Economics I called “about Hawks and Doves”.
It is a title of a book of the psychologist Kahnemann who received the Noble Price for Economics in 2002.
This blog shows that humans when they are acting under Pressure use a lot of biasses.
8. Ecological Rationality:
This is a summary of the documents out of the Appendix.
8.1 Homo Heuristicus
Gerd Gigerenzer of the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin explains how humans act when they are taking risks and how you can reduce this risk by looking at, bias, variance(“volatility”) and noise.
People believe that more information is always better but there are Less-is-more effects:
More information or computation can decrease accuracy; therefore, minds rely on simple heuristics in order to be more accurate than strategies that use more information and time.
Researchers discovered that equal random weights can predict almost as accurately as, and sometimes better than, multiple linear regression.This is comparable to tossing or throwing dice. (or using the I Thing).
Other scientists discovered that in a market where the actors use highly advanced statistical tools the market becomes sometimes highly inpredictable and sometimes not (“Predictibality Bubbles“).
Remember that the Quaternion of Jung is also a 4th order.
It looks like the Algorytms try to beat the competing Algorytms by creating an even more complex environment.
It can also be shown that when a scientist tries to fit the data in a polynomial the acccurasy increases from 1->4 and drops from 4-> infinity meaning that a 4rd order polynome (AX**4+BX**3+CX**2+DX+E is the best fit.
The higher the degree of the polynomial, the lower the error in fitting the observed data sample. The same figure also shows, for the same models, the error in predicting novel observations.
Here, the relationship between the degree of polynomial used and the resulting predictive accuracy is U-shaped. Both high- and low- degree polynomials suffer from greater error than the best predicting polynomial model, which has degree-4.
Achieving a good fit to observations does not necessarily mean we have found a good model, and choosing the model with the best fit is likely to result in poor predictions.
All the research proves that big models using big Data using complex algorytms never will work which means that the model of the World Climate that is fitting a probably simple fractal pattern is wrong.
What the research probably shows is that we See what we want to See and we look with our personality proving the idea of John Wheeler dat the Universe is a Mirror looking at itself.
8.2 Heuristic ~Decision Making in Medicine
Doctors have to make decisions under uncertainty and often under the constraints of limited time, sress and personal risk (legal liability).
According to the fast-and-frugal heuristics research program, these decisions can nevertheless be made successfully, because people can rely on a large repertoire of heuristics—an adaptive toolbox—with each heuristic (ie, each tool) being adapted to a specific decision-making environment.
In environments where the Risk of being Sued is high if a patient is mistakenly diagnosed and/or treated as healthy and where physicians seek to avoid potential lawsuits,
it is ecologically rational for them to follow the Defensive heuristic “err on the safe side,” being overcautious and prescribing more diagnostic tests and treatments than necessary.
8.3 Simplicity as a Predictive Strategy
if simplicitly in the preditive strategy will fall short of the ideal represented by the optimal model, and if so, how great is the premium one pays for simplicity. Relatedly, are there environmental conditions and properties that are conducive to good performance of simple heuristics in these environments?
The Bias Variance Trade Off
Simply Rational
The relationship between AI and Heuristics
9. Metabletics
I found the first book about Metabletics around 1970 and have read and bought all the books I could find.
Metabletics has changed my WorldView and the way I look at reality.
Every Coincedence has a Meaning and this meaning offers a guide to Change a path.
Later I found that this attitude is an “Eastern” attitude and can be found in the Chinese Tao.
The Tao gave me the I-Tjing, the Tarot and insight in the Theory behind Eastern Philosophy that was supported by the possibilty to study Philosophy in Leuiden (van Peursen) and a life-long intererest in the concepts behind the concepts.
The opened Body
One of the books about the history of Medicine is called the Opened Body.
The essence of this book (to me) is that opening a body was a taboe just as touching a body of a woman by a man was a taboe.
Is was the main reason why eatern medicine stated focused on the Whole and the doctor had to deduce the illnes by Touching the Pulse and looking at the tongue.
The Complexity in Western Medicine that looked a lot like Eastern Mediine exploded when it was very simple to get bodies for the Anatomical Theather and every part could be opened to show more parts.
10. Choice Architectures
The innovation in Economic theory came from David Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
They invented Dual process theory that asserts that tthere are two kinds of thinking: one, which is intuitive and automatic, and another, which is reflective and rational.
The distinction between them is related tot he amount of Pressure (Time, Social, Fear ) in the Situation.
Later their long time collaboraters Thaler and Sunstein invented Nudge ?theory in which they defined strategies to manipulate humans to make a choice.
Nudging is used by Politicians and Salesman (Marketing) that share the same Archetype-Connection (Game) (the Cross Feeling (green)<-> (blue) Thinking).
Making a Choice is a function of the Emotions. The emotions are one of the four “organs” of the body. Where the other organs are the Senses, The Cognition and the Imagination.
The four “organs” together with the fifth in the center being the consciousness often reprsented by the “inner eye” or the Observer.
11. Leibniz and the Priciple of Sufficient Reason
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz lived between 1646 and 1716 at the end of the Renaissance and the Start of the Enlightment , the time of the Rationalists.
In 1789 the French Revolution took place. I was the start of a major Social transformation of Society.
Leibniz was a briljant Mathematician and a Magister, highly trained in Alchemy, the Art of Re-combination
In his work De Arte Combinatoria Leibniz developed a general theory of science that was based on a Fusion between Alchemy and Logic.
His model was based on the Ars Magna created In 1275 by Raymond Lull designed as a tool to Classify and Generate all the Knowledge of the Universe based on a Set of Nine (3×3) Concepts.
Lull copied his model from the Magi. They used a Device called the Zairja, an Idea Generator that used the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet to represent the 28 Categories of Thought in Arab Philosophy.
Leibniz identified two kinds of truth, Necessary and Contingent truths And he claimed that all truths are based upon two principles: (1) non-contradiction, taken from Human Logic and (2) Sufficient Reason taken from Religion.
“Dieu a choisi celuy qui est… le plus simple en hypotheses et le plus riche en phenomenes” (God has chosen that which is the most simple in hypotheses and the most rich in phenomena)”. “Mais quand une regle est fort composée, ce qui luy est conforme, passe pour irrégulier” (But when a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes for random)”.
In essence it means that the most complex phenomenon is explained with the most simple rule.
A simple rule is fractal (repeating) compression of a description of an Event until the there is no rule that is able to compress the rule. The most compessed rule is rule is a random state.
Yhis means that it is situated in the center of the crossed squares being the center of the enter, the Rose.
12. Conclusion
12.1 Adding Complexity because of Observing more Detail:
The Sheng cycle appears when the numbers 1-9 are connected.
The Sheng Cycle is a transformation of the Cycle of Alchemy where the Center (the Rose) became a part of the Cycle representing the Whole or the Nothing being the Not-wHole (the Cross).
The parts of the Sheng Cycle are called Tatva’s in India and the ” elements” all over the world.
In medicine they were called the humores.
Medical doctors where only Payed when their customers stayed Healthy.
Medicine practice stayed the same until the body was opened.
It was opened because opening the body became a payed for spectacle in a theatre when healthcare was commercialised after the Church of Rome stopped paying for the hospitals.
Only the Rich people could afford a trained medical doctor.
From that time on Medicine became more complex and the amount of ilnesses increased.
It become even more complex when Rontgen invented a Machine to look into the body.
When we look with an Instrument we look with the Theory that is built in in the Instrument.
Humans are not aware of that just like the Fish is not aware of the water.