Against shallow anti-rational humanism

Jessica writes: I get so tired of people dumping on decision theory because real world decisions are complex. If decision theory is so deeply flawed, I’d love to know what alternative methods the critics advise for trying to evaluate and improve decision making in some real world setting. Should we give up on modeling completely because some cause problems for our assumptions? What happened to the epistemic value of attempting to formalize goals so as to better understand what components we think are at play? Do we really want to go back to talking about man as a creature of instinct and habit and leave it at that? I agree, and this reminds me of a discussion from twenty years ago (!) about the transition from viewing people as “rational animals” to viewing people as “irrational computers.” Here’s Thomas Jefferson from 1823: We believed . . . that man was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and that he could be restrained from wrong…