How to make choices in light of our cognitive limitations is a widely discussed issue in decision theory. In a 1984 Michael D. Cohen and Robert Axelrod published an unusual proposal in this debate, which has been unduly neglected. Their paper "Coping with Complexity: The Adaptive Value of Changing Utility" suggests that to deal with complexity and to overcome our limited knowledge, motivational change might help. Their paper presents a case in which changing utility is adaptive, that is in which motivational change leads to better outcomes because the agents has wrong or incomplete beliefs.
The proposal has received surprisingly little attention given the deserved fame of its authors, but its approach invites a reconstruction in an interactive Jupyter Notebook. In the following I will walk you through the basic idea of the paper and provide some visualisation.
You can view the Notebook here using the Jupyter projects nbviewer. The interactive widgets, however, don't work in the viewer, so you better view it in your own Jupyter installation.
I created the Notebook to explore some of the features Jupyter offers and draw some attention to Cohen and Axelrod's proposal, which has suffered neglect.
The Notebook is GPL v.3 licensed.