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Decision Making

by John Mullen and Byron Roth

"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential -- for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never." -- Soren Kierkegaard

Okay, so possibility can sometimes be a big disappointment. Nevertheless, anyone care for some warm, calculating decisions? Care to violate the unspoken rule that thou shalt be carefree in every decision thy make?

Rich in practical applications, the first half of Decision Making: Its Logic and Practice is worth the money. Roth and Mullen cover basic statistics, various psychological and philosophical errors, and methods of generating and selecting alternatives

This is hard-core decision making for major decisions. If, for example, you are donating thousands of dollars to a charity and you are more serious about the benefits of the results than how the donation makes you feel or how it affects your image, this helps, especially in the event that your criteria are more than how it makes you feel and how it will improve your public image.

Humans are not great intuitive thinkers. We waste the whole damn year, then we lose an hour to daylight savings and act as if one hour were suddenly the most important thing in the world. The authors argue that what you do with your brain is more important than the intelligence you have.

Would you, for example, walk a mile to save five dollars on a pair of sunglasses but not to save five dollars on a couch? If so, you have made a framing error. In both cases five dollars is saved. Framing errors are often similar to the "penny wise, pound foolish" cliché. We buy high price items without exploring enough alternatives, yet we carefully calculate how many dimes to put in a parking meter. These decision-making methods become easier with practice.

Would you complete the last year to obtain a degree in zucchini engineering after learning that zucchinis have been banned for causing cancer? Unless you know something about the development of cancer free zucchinis, you should ignore sunk costs. Benefits and costs now and in the future matter most. It is painful to quit something after much time, effort and money have been invested, but it often must be done.

The authors report a poisoning of grapes scare, even though the grapes in question had far less cyanide than ordinary lima beans or apple seeds. Somewhere I heard that under 0.1 percent of pesticides are human made. Americans consume by weight 1000 times more plant-made pesticides than human-made pesticides. Of course, that says nothing about their comparative toxicities.

Roth and Mullen cover availability biases, cognitive dissonance, halo-effects, confirmation biases and so on. And remember to create environments that are helpful, so you do not have to rely on will power. For example: To watch less television, get rid of cable, throw away the antenna, bolt the TV to the most loathed part of the home or throw the television away. Engage in binding precommitments. Agree to pay someone five dollars every time you watch TV. Have someone tie you to a tree. Do not let your environments manipulate you. Choose them and use them as your ally. Set up your environment so that it takes bizarre, brazen acts of willfulness to do things other than good things.

To think of better alternatives, one can brainstorm--thinking of dozens of alternatives, including ludicrous alternatives, while reserving judgment till later. Or have individuals anonymously write ideas down, then let others write their anonymous comments--the Delphi technique. Or you could spend time doing better research or a use combination of methods.

Decision Making describes decision trees, a method for diagramming alternatives and calculating expected values. The expected value is the probability of an outcome times the value of the outcome should it occur. If the probability of getting a parking ticket in a spot is one in four and the cost of the ticket is $60, then the expected value of parking there is negative $15, not counting the hassle of the ticket and other costs or benefits. When making decisions, the expected value matters much more than the probability of an outcome. Evidence sufficient to require action is not the same as evidence sufficient to prove something with a high probability. It is best to assume that when a robber makes threats with a bulge in his coat pocket that it is a real gun and not a finger gun. The expected value of getting shot is horrible. You don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt or the preponderance of evidence to avoid stray German Sheppard’s. (Oddly, if many people had one in a million odds of winning 50 million in the lottery, they would line up in the streets to buy tickets. If an important moral course had a 98 percent probability of success they would howl about how uncertain, boring and subjective morality is and do nothing.)

One problem is that we stop using problem-solving strategies because they are psychologically taxing. Instead of finding better problems, better solutions and better arguments, we go back to the old, habitual ways of thinking which include: The first feeling I have is where I need to go, the first plausible solution is the best solution, one reason is enough, the most obvious, pressing, available or habitual problems are the most important problems.

Keep in mind:

· How you think about a thing screws your head up more than the thing itself, unless, of course, the thing itself is a spike through the skull. Beliefs about a causal factor are often a much larger causal factor than the alleged causal factor.

· The authors remind us not to confuse worrying, then leaping in the dark with good decision-making procedures.

· We should see choices as a thrill and an adventure rather than as a burden.

· We often have ambivalences toward strategies, approaching them as if they were inherently stultifying and inhuman. In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty and conflict one can zone out or one can pursue the challenges.

· Sometimes the ends justify the means. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes the means justify the ends. Sometimes they do not.

· There is a difference between avoiding major obligations and trivial, manufactured difficulties. Are your efforts providing something of great value or distraction and damage control?

· There is almost never a one and only cause of something.

· Causes are often ripples in pond or as Herman Melville put it, "A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow-men; and along those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."

· One has to avoid both focusing too much on details and too much on big pictures.

· We often know how to do better than we do, but we often do not know how to arrive at optimal or satisfactory alternatives.

The errors here are but quibbles about such things as "centrifugal" force. If you're looking for easy infotainments, don't buy this book. It has a level of difficulty similar to a freshman college physics text and some technical language. Anyone permanently committed to the leap in the dark method of decision-making, perhaps because of its alleged esthetic value, should not buy this book. Little effort to think about good and bad plus little effort to learn how to think about good and bad adds up to disaster. Highly recommended.

—book review article by J.T. Fournier

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