A paper written for COGS/PSY/MGM/LING/PHIL 696E
This is part research paper, part rant about how economists, Game Theorists, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists talk about human decision-making.
Specifically I take issue with the idea of what is "rational". I argue that rationality as it is usually understood is not a coherent or useful concept in real-life or human evolution, and by existention is not so meaningful to talk about what is "rational" or not in cognitive science and decision theory, rather we should speak about the mechanisms of particular mental heuristics.
Rather when people talk about "reason", they're talking about a deliberative system which is very imperfect and vastly inferior or typical heuristics and biases when used outside of its very narrow deserved domain.