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#decisionmaking

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Do you always go to the same café? Or do you try something new?

That’s the exploration vs. exploitation dilemma: Decision under uncertainty.

Multi-armed bandits model exactly that.

And this dilemma shows up everywhere: Recommender systems, A/B tests, online ads, even in human psychology.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman called this one of the most fundamental cognitive patterns.

🎰 I explain what it is, why it matters, and how AI systems handle it.

:blobcoffee: Full article here: towardsdatascience.com/simple-

Towards Data Science · Simple Guide to Multi-Armed Bandits: A Key Concept Before Reinforcement Learning | Towards Data ScienceHow AI learns to make better decisions and why you should care about exploration vs. exploitation

How Career Counselling Empowers Students

growthcentre.org/career-counse

Career counselling isn't just advice—it's a structured process that empowers students to make informed decisions. With expert assessments, one-on-one sessions, and actionable plans, you gain confidence and clarity. Whether you're in high school or college, counselling can help align your abilities and aspirations with the right opportunities.

The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke

This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity. 

On the Trail (1889) by Winslow Homer. Original from The National Gallery of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 .  Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate. 

When you’re microscopic, the territory is the map; at human scale, we externalise those cues as landmarks—then mirror the process inside our heads. Just as cells follow chemical gradients, our thoughts follow self-made landmarks, yet these landmarks are vaporous.

From the outside our mind is a single place, it is our identity. Probe closer and our identity is nebulous and dissolves the way a city dissolves into smaller and smaller places the closer you look. We use our identity to create the first stable place in the world and then use other places to navigate life. However, these places come from unreliable sources, our internal and external environments.  How do we know the places are even real, and do we have the knowledge to trust their reality? Well, we don’t. We can’t judge our mental landmarks false. Callard calls this normative self-blindness: the built-in refusal to saw off the branch we stand on.   

Normative self-blindness is a trick to gloss over details and keep moving. Insta-places are conjured from our experience and are treated as solid no matter how poorly they are tied down by actual knowledge. We can accept that a place was loosely formed in the past, an error, or is not yet well defined in the future, is unknown. However, in the moment, the places exist and we use them to see. 

Understanding and accepting that our minds work this way is a key tenet of Socratic Thinking. It makes adopting the posture of inquiry much easier. Socratic inquiry begins by admitting that everyone’s guiding landmarks may be made of semi-solid smoke.

1Chan, Edgar, Oliver Baumann, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Jason B. Mattingley. “From Objects to Landmarks: The Function of Visual Location Information in Spatial Navigation.” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00304

2Freas, Cody A., and Ken Cheng. “The Basis of Navigation Across Species.” Annual Review of Psychology 73, no. 1 (January 4, 2022): 217–41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-111311.

🧠✨ Just published – “The dynamics and geometry of choice in the premotor #cortex” by Genkin et  al. shows how the #brain encodes #decisions. Using single-trial #NeuralRecordings, they model #decisionmaking as 1D trajectories on a high-dimensional #manifold.

Key findings:
👉 Diverse tuning curves reflect one latent decision variable
👉 Dynamics follow an attractor
👉 Geometry links sensory & cognitive coding

✍️ nature.com/articles/s41586-025
💻 github.com/engellab/neuralflow

NatureThe dynamics and geometry of choice in the premotor cortex - NatureA population code for the dynamics of choice formation in the primate premotor cortex is revealed, with diverse single-neuron tuning to a shared decision variable.

Hey Fedi, I am trying to find a flowchart that was so life altering, I re-wrote it ... and then lost the copy I made, the original I'd saved on a computer, and where I found it from. The focus of the flowchart was various tactics around increasing and decreasing urgency around decisions - it started in the middle, and had 3 branches IIRC, and it was a huge flowchart (it took me an hour to put it on an oversized piece of paper that I had tacked on the wall for years). #NeuroatypicalResources #AskFedi #DecisionMaking

Boosts appreciated
#NeuroatypicalResources #AskFedi #DecisionMaking