In a century of increasing risks and opportunities, it is important to be able to form accurate beliefs about the future based on our evidence, and to make smart decisions based upon those beliefs. Improving our practical abilities in both of these areas is critical since it can help us deal with all of the big issues that will arise -- even those we have not yet anticipated. This could involve developing techniques to improve the rationality of individuals (be they researchers, policy makers, or members of the general public), as well as improving the rationality of groups by changing their internal dynamics.
We are also interested in improving wisdom, which we define as the ability to get the big picture at least roughly right. It is common in decision making to lose track of the big picture, and this can have catastrophic consequences or can mean that we fail to achieve almost all of the value at stake. Humanity needs to be able to set global priorities and to develop the tools and techniques for keeping everything in proportion within that discussion.
Our research in this area includes the following topics:
- How can we identify, understand, and reduce cognitive biases?
- How can institutional innovations such as prediction markets improve information aggregation and probabilistic forecasting?
- How should an ethically-motivated agent act under conditions of profound moral uncertainty?
- How can we correct for observation selection effects in anthropic reasoning?
- How can we integrate our thinking on big picture questions in such a way that all crucial considerations are properly taken into account?
- What can developments in neuroscience and cognitive psychology teach us about moral cognition and about phenomena such as rationalization and social signaling?
- Under what conditions, if any, can rational Bayesian agents knowingly agree to disagree?
- How can we better evaluate claims to expertise in areas of relevance to public policy?
- How can we foster better collaborative cognition and more honest truth-seeking in social processes such as the mass media and political decision making?