BI 056 Tom Griffiths: The Limits of Cognition

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I speak with Tom Griffiths about his “resource-rational framework”, inspired by Herb Simon's bounded rationality and Stuart Russel’s bounded optimality concepts. The resource-rational framework illuminates how the constraints of optimizing our available cognition can help us understand what algorithms our brains use to get things done, and can serve as a bridge between Marr’s computational, algorithmic, and implementation levels of understanding. We also talk cognitive prostheses, artificial general intelligence, consciousness, and more.

• Visit Tom's Computational Cognitive Science Lab.
• Check out his book with Brian Christian, Algorithms To Live By.
• Some of the papers we discuss or mention:
  • Rational Use of Cognitive Resources: Levels of Analysis Between the Computational and the Algorithmic.
  • Resource-rational analysis: understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources.
• Data on the mind - the data repository we discussed briefly
• A paper that discusses it: Finding the traces of behavioral and cognitive processes in big data and naturally occurring datasets.