Week 3 · Reasoning, Models & Scarcity
How cognitive bias and weak evidence can distort explanations.
Your AI study mentor
Human judgment works through shortcuts, memory, pattern recognition, and emotion. Those strengths can also make weak explanations feel obvious and bad evidence feel decisive. I ask you to reopen the decision from week 2 because bias is easier to understand when it can alter a conclusion you already care about. The goal is not merely to identify a bias, but to revise a claim when the evidence demands it.
Naming a bias is not evidence that it occurred. Avoid turning psychological labels into a new way to dismiss yourself or other people.
What specific evidence would make you lower your confidence in your current explanation?
Start with the aims and questions so the readings have a purpose.
Use the prompt under each source to produce notes, not highlights alone.
Test the ideas through observation, analysis, or a small intervention.
Save the deliverables and check your work against the completion criteria.
Define what you are trying to understand before deciding that you have understood it.
As you read, keep the tone practical. The goal is not to accuse yourself of bias; it is to make your conclusion sturdier by locating where it is vulnerable.
Core material
4 guided readings, in the order shown.
Max H. Bazerman · Noba Project
An accessible psychology module on rational decision processes, heuristics, biases, overconfidence, framing, and better decision strategies.
Read the whole module once. Write down the six-step rational decision process, then list the biases that would most likely disrupt each step.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman · Science
The foundational 1974 Science article that introduced representativeness, availability, anchoring, and the systematic errors these heuristics can produce.
Read the original Science article, focusing on representativeness, availability, and anchoring. Reconstruct the evidence for each heuristic, then note which conclusions concern the demonstrated experiments and which would require broader replication before generalizing.
Daniel Kahneman · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
A landmark and academically influential synthesis of judgment and decision-making research, useful for its major framework but not a catalogue of uniformly settled findings.
Read chapters 1-5. Keep two columns: what the fast/slow distinction clarifies, and where it may be too tidy. Treat individual study claims cautiously—especially priming examples—and distinguish the book's lasting influence from the current strength of every result it describes.
Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A philosophical and interdisciplinary overview of bounded rationality, including Simon, heuristics, decision sciences, and normative questions.
Read the introduction and the early sections on Simon. Focus on why bounded rationality is not simply stupidity or irrationality; it is decision-making under limits.
8 study actions turn the reading into observable work.
Optional resources for going further after the reading plan.
A rigorous philosophy-of-science overview of what models are, how they represent, and how they relate to theories.
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