Table 1 Ecological rationality—key ideas

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!

Renouncing an approach that would be able to provide perfect results under ideal conditions for a simpler alternative can improve performance under real-world circumstances

There is no golden bullet!

The optimal strategy cannot be identified in general but depends on preconditions of the specific use case

The diversity of epistemic approaches is an asset

The above insights can be generalized beyond tailoring machine learning algorithms to a broader range of forecasting and decision making strategies. Examples for such alternatives range from expert intuition (“gut feeling” [11]) and deliberately simple decision rules (fast-and-frugal heuristics [9]), to debiasing subjective judgements (“crowd intelligence” [10, 12]) and the strategic integration across several sources of information and knowledge