Grant Renier is Chairman of Intuality Inc and the developer of IntualityAI® and its internal logic Intuitive Rationality®. He founded four ventures, each of which incorporated successive versions of that technology, following positions with two Fortune 500 firms, in international, internal consulting positions and as CFO and Director of Corporate Development. He has an undergraduate degree in engineering, mathematics and an MBA that includes studies in behavioral science and economics. He has lectured about AI and its applications throughout the US, Southeast Asia, and Europe, including MIT Forums, and various graduate schools. Dr. Howard Rankin is the Science Director of Intuality AI. Dr. Howard Rankin has Masters and Doctoral degrees in clinical psychology and is the VP of Science at Intuality Inc. He has extensive research and clinical expertise and knowledge in the areas of psychology, neuroscience and neurotechnology. Howard is also an experienced speaker and best-selling and award-winning author. Dr. Rankin has written 12 books in his own name, co-written another 10, and ghostwritten 30 others, all non-fictions. His work has been featured in many newspapers and magazines and he has appeared on national networks including CNN, ABC, CBS, BBC, and on “The View” and “20/20”. His latest books are I Think Therefore I Am Wrong: A Guide to Bias, Political Correctness, Fake News and the Future of Mankind, which explores the default setting of the mind and how that can lead us astray and Power Talk: The Art of Effective Communication (2 nd edition), He also hosts the podcast How Not to Think. They spoke with Formidable Men about their new book, Intuitive Rationality the new direction of AI.
How do you make decisions? What influences your thinking at any one time? How much logic do you consciously apply in thinking about issues? The developing field of behavioral economics pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has shown us that humans being aren’t very rational and instead depend on quick rules of thumb and other heuristics that shape thinking and decision-making. These heuristics include subconscious factors programmed by past experiences, environmental factors like other people, and internal factors like mood and physiological state. So, how do you marry “intuition” with rationality? And should you?
Grant, you are the Chairman and Founder of Intuality AI and Dr. Rankin you are the Science Director. Tell us about your backgrounds and what led you to your new book, Intuitive Rationality.
Grant…
My undergrad and grad degrees are in engineering, mathematics, business, economics and behavioral science. I worked for two Fortune 500 firms nationally and internationally, in internal consulting, corporate development and IT. I formed concepts of simulating human decision-making in the 60’s that were contrary to large statistical modeling and prediction that purposely excluded human irrationality. My theory was that people make things ‘happen’, not machines despite my educational focus. Furthermore, our reality is a summation and constantly evolving results of human decision-making, the final function of which, before acting upon those decisions, is subconscious intuition that represents our individual biases about the consciously realized facts and figures. This cognitive hard wiring causes our direct behavior and is indirectly reflected in everything that we create. I created my first of five ventures using the mathematics and computer code to simulate his human decision-making logic, believing that it would have general application and success regardless of a specific application data input. So far, so good.
Howard’s replies…
I had a long career in psychology as an academic and practitioner and ten years ago started to integrate neuroscience into my practice. I became fascinated by the evolving work in cognitive bias and how we think. Shortly thereafter I met Grant and started to work with his team at Intuality producing written materials to explain what they were doing, the results they were having and the potential impact of their work.
Tell us about the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their influence on your book.
Grant…
I was surprised to learn of their research beginning in the late 80’s. it was forming their behavioral economics theories – the relationships and sequences of human behavior and decision making around facts and figures. They defined missing human cognitive functions from what Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler calls Econs, the science of the day that excludes human behavior from prediction making. Kahneman, Tversky, Thaler and others found dependable behavioral relationships that we had defined as gut-feeling heuristics for each of our selection of 12 major subconscious biases. Our book defines these key biases and provides not only their stories, but technical explanations of real-world examples in our range of applications, in investment markets, sports, health, elections, component failure prediction, public opinion and more. Their academic work confirmed our results, from multi-millions of data input events, and many of the decision-making biases relationships that we had discovered.
Howard…
Kahneman and Tversky were the recent pioneers of how we think, although of course, there were many others before them. But their research really helped define and popularize cognitive processes. Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is a great summary of all the foundational research on cognitive bias
Should we marry “intuition” with rationality?
Grant…
Intuitive Rationality is our science, where ‘Intuitive’ represents the focus of our computer logic on the human intuition structure within the processing of real-world input data, and ‘Rationality’ is its rational computer code. Our First Principles approach to developing this science, and the commercial computer system, is based on the theory that all human decision-making intrinsically contains a final subconscious intuitive function prior to taking any action. Intuitive Rationality’s First Principles assume that the logic of intuition is hard wired – married – that produce many future alternatives from which we and Intuitive Rationality make so-called irrational choices.
Howard…
Yes, for two reasons. First, rationality is a system that depends on having a lot of the relevant data, and on many occasions we don’t have any data, let alone a lot of relevant data. This is a limitation on a lot of psychological research. You can only measure so many – actually very few – variables, and so the results are almost always best estimates given an incomplete data set.
Second, certainly when it comes to personal decision-making, we are getting messages from our subconscious that typically manifest as feelings that are difficult to comprehend. Part of that is that the subconscious doesn’t do language, it works on feelings. Now these feelings might represent similar past experiences that are relevant to the situation at hand, or something totally irrelevant. In my book I think Therefore I Am Wrong, an example of how feelings can influence thoughts and the narrative. A woman is working alongside a male colleague and realizes she is feeling flushed. Did someone just turn up the heating? Or…does she have some string feelings for this guy? She thinks about that for the next few hours until the next day when she is diagnosed with having the flu. Love bug, indeed!
Explain why both heuristics and rationality are important in thinking, decision-making and predicting.
Grant…
I would add to what Howard has written, if it’s too much of a deep dive: the logical flow of processing real-world data is to filter out noise, process the data through the gut-feeling heuristic for each of 12 bias, update those biases, calculate a summary bias for the new data, look for correlations with other influencer data, calculate a landscape of all future probabilities, scan that landscape for emergence of high probability events, and output actionable alerts as instructions to users to something that meets the defined objective of the application, like buy a stock, bet on a football team, vote for a candidate, take a medication, replace a component before failure, etc.
Howard…
It is really critical, a major life skill, to understand how our thinking and narratives are shaped. Yes, we have a system called logic, but then we also have a massive system of influences, from the subconscious to cognitive biases, to the environment, which shape our perceptions, and thus how we apply logic. These reciprocal influences interactive with each other to shape decisions and predictions, in fact, thoughts about anything.
Is logic overrated?
Grant…
Again, going with Howard’s writing, I would add: There is a logic to everything knowing that it is either provable and accepted as true – turning a door handle expecting that the door will open – being modified and refined – steering a car around a corner – or is yet to be discovered – what’s on the other side of the moon. This is the ongoing experience of our species and life as we know it. What is overrated is not the word logic but our predisposition to call something logical while being unwilling to emotional accept that all logic is probable.
Howard…
Over-rated in the sense that it is a system that is applied to our perceptions, needs and wants and is therefore fallible. In I think Therefore I Am Wrong I give an example. If I think that the lamp is telling me to do dangerous and nasty things, it’s perfectly logical for me to unplug it. Often, it’s not logic that’s the problem but the underlying assumptions that you are using the logic on.
Grant, Tell us about your predictive analytics program.
Grant…
Simplifying what I’ve already written: IntualityAI is the commercialized version of Intuitive Rationality science. It is currently making successful predictions in the investment markets, sports, health, elections, component monitoring, public opinion, point-of-sale predictions, gaming, etc. It can operate on mobile devices to central servers, remotely or under direct user control.
What are 3 key points that a reader will gain from Intuitive Rationality?
Grant…
- The logic as to how we make decisions
- A detailed understanding of our key subconscious biases
- We have developed a new artificial intelligence, called Intuitive General Intelligence, that is now available for predicting and managing a wide range of applications, those already operating, and millions yet to be defined.
Howard…
- They will get a good, and hopefully entertaining, insight into cognitive biases and how they impact perception, thinking and decision-making.
2. They will hopefully understand how heuristics like intuition can be combined with rationality in their own lives.
3, They can see how IntualityAI has created a system, that is successful at making predictions.
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