Book Review of: B. Recht (2026). The Irrational Decision. How we gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, x + 270 pp.
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Dr G.J. van Bussel
The author
Benjamin Recht is Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He has received several prizes and awards recognizing the quality and impact of his research and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and Mathematical Programming. He is co‑founder of the Conference on Learning for Decision and Control. Recht’s research group investigates how to design machine learning systems that remain robust when interacting with dynamic and uncertain environments. He develops reliable benchmarks and baselines for the assessment of performance of machine learning technology. He has demonstrated, for example, that standard machine learning theory often mischaracterizes the behaviour of deep neural networks and that a number of results in personalized medicine overstate their practical utility. His research is strengthened by close collaborations with scholars in applied domains such as computational imaging and robotics. 1
The key thesis
The key thesis is introduced and presented in the first chapter. Recht prefers the term ‘mathematical rationality’ to describe the narrow, statistical conception of reason that inspired the desire to build computers, shaped how they would eventually operate, and constrained the kinds of problems they would be considered well suited to solve. The Irrational Decision traces how, in the 1940s, mathematicians converged on a distinctive definition of rationality in which every decision is cast as a statistical problem of risk. This notion of rationality is heavily mathematical, and it has proved attractive to hyper‑online rationalists, public intellectuals, and billionaire technologists who (quite irrational) take their own success as evidence of uniquely clear thinking rather than luck or structural advantage.
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