There is an old cliché that man is the exemplar of rationality and the steward of reason. This idea comes from the Enlightenment. Now that optimism has gone out of fashion, psychological studies collected over the last 150 years have shown how far from rational we really are.
Let's experience this from an evolutionary-psychological perspective. Instead of making assumptions, as did 19th century thinkers who believed that the human mind was ideally suited to carry out rational commands, let us think of the mind as an evolved mechanism capable of fulfilling evolutionary needs. What we should expect from the mind is not necessarily rationality per se, but rather what is most likely to help us survive.
If the brain has evolved to help us survive in the conditions in which early humans lived, it should not be surprising that the mind has mastered the areas it should have in such a situation. Why would primates in the jungle or savannah need to hone the mind's ability to calculate probabilities properly?
We need to know what our minds are for, and to accept them as a tool for reasoning, but also as a tool with limitations. Our brains are prone to mistakes, and in poker these mistakes can be the cause of a downfall. The only way to avoid this is to be self-aware and try to deal with these mistakes consciously.
There are two big ideas when it comes to the limitations of knowledge. The first is about bounded rationality. Bounded rationality is the thesis that human rationality is constructed from three factors: the information available to the human being, the limitations of the processing of the information received, and the amount of time available to make a decision. Although we can imagine some ideal rationality that takes into account all possible factors, weighs them perfectly, thinks them through and comes to conclusions dispassionately in order to make the best choice, people do not do so. We simply cannot do that. "Real" rationality is a fantasy, at least for us humans. The best we can do is a partial version of rationality, brought to the mechanism of our mind.
Another concept we have already encountered is cognitive biases or biases. Cognitive biases are persistent patterns of behavioural errors that occur in human thought. These biases are best understood as having developed for a specific reason. For example, they may be useful for cultural or emotional well-being, or they may function as an effective problem-solving technique that allows us to make simple decisions much more quickly in situations where accuracy is not important.
There are many abilities that have proved more important to evolution than rationality. These include speed, efficiency, and of course the ability to survive. Thus our evolved mind prefers a comfortable illusion to reality. But the abilities that are important to poker players are quite different from the qualities selected and refined by evolution. Poker values indifference and cold rationality. There is no room for illusion in poker. The closer you are to reality, the better poker players you become.
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