How do you arrive at your decisions?

in #ethics7 years ago (edited)

What does it mean to arrive at a decision?

OODA.BoydOODA.Boyd
By Patrick Edwin Moran (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

If you make a decision following a coherent process then you can arrive at a best decision by a process of elimination. An example could be the use of decision theory where an individual uses a coherent process to arrive at an optimal decision.

The area of choice under uncertainty represents the heart of decision theory. Known from the 17th century (Blaise Pascal invoked it in his famous wager, which is contained in his Pensées, published in 1670), the idea of expected value is that, when faced with a number of actions, each of which could give rise to more than one possible outcome with different probabilities, the rational procedure is to identify all possible outcomes, determine their values (positive or negative) and the probabilities that will result from each course of action, and multiply the two to give an "expected value", or the average expectation for an outcome; the action to be chosen should be the one that gives rise to the highest total expected value.

Realistically it is not likely that an individual can make high quality decisions consistently by themselves by consistently following a coherent process like decision theory. Particularly because it is a lot of calculations and eventually a decision will be too complex for the typical individual to calculate. An additional problem is information scarcity where the individual simply doesn't have access to all the information. How can an individual overcome information scarcity?

Decision by committee as a way of overcoming information scarcity

If an individual doesn't make each decision by themselves but instead by a trusted committee and the committee in theory has greater access to information than any individual by themselves then the decision quality likely will be enhanced.

References

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theory
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_probability
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Answering the title before reading the article! Because fuck it why not!?

I arrive at my decisions mostly through sleep depravation, far too many cigarettes, and way too much caffeine. I don't generally remember making them honestly.

@dana-edwards This is supercool! Thanks!

Thanks for sharing

Up voted and folllwed
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I use NLP ,Hypercommunication theory Fuzzy logic and Chaos Theory , Im like an oracle.

We all use that, just without the buzzwords.

A committee might have greater access to information overall, but they are often further from the sources of relevant information at a time a decision needs to be made, and they also typically have divergent interests from the individual.

Wonderful post there

We all seem to be on the same wave length. A very good book to read is "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer.

@dana-edwards The online market place is a wonderful industry for truth of the matter and lies. Now it is actually quite challenging to acknowledge where by the reality is.

I usually decide based on emotion. I know it's not the best, but women tend to do that unconciously. They build a story inside there head of what if and what not. I would like to get better at elimination I think it has an easy procedure. Thanks for a wonderful post <3

If you get trolled will you make improper decisions because you feel like it?

Exactly...I could have written the same comment ;-)! Also definitely the Emotional person!

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