Gershman Samuel. What Makes Us Smart: The Computational Logic of Human Cognition

Princeton University Press, 2021. — 219 p. — ISBN 9780691205700This book is motivated by a fundamental puzzle about human cognition: How can we apparently be so stupid and so smart at the same time? On the one hand, the catalog of human error is vast: we perceive things that aren’t there and fail to perceive things right in front of us, we forget things that hap-pened and remember things that didn’t, we say things we don’t mean and mean things we don’t say, we’re inconsistent, biased, myopic, overly optimistic, and—despite this litany of imperfections—overconfident. In short, we appear to be as far as one can imagine from an ideal of rationality.