Quotes About Decision-making

We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective.

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. —RUSSELL ACKOFF,

There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions.

most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information.

There can be as many wrong reasons to do the right thing as there are stars in the sky. There might even be more than one legitimate right reason. But there is never a right reason to do the wrong thing. Not ever.

The educational process must again provide the opportunity for students to make choices and live with the consequences of these choices. Teaching is not simply telling people what to believe and do.

We want far better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.

Until your desires are specific and completely clear, you won't be happy with the results they bring. You've got to fill in all the blanks in your description of a dream life—or risk having others fill in those blanks for you. Leave nothing to chance, and decide on everything you want.

And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

You can't show me an ad on TV with hard bodies and say I have to buy that car. You have to tell me why that car is better and safer than another car.

It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves: this was the moment to learn who I was and what I'd become...

A loved husband is the companion of companions, the supreme sharer, and a happy wife often sounds trivial when she is really sampling and enjoying their mutual and unique confidence. But in doing it, she largely loses her power of independent decision and action. She either brings her husband round to her way of thinking or goes over to his, and mostly she doesn't know or care which it is.

When you own your feelings, you have lots of choices.

Economic theory would tell you that a rational person would take the thirty dollars every time. Forget the other party, the decision was simple. You get thirty dollars or you get nothing. With this logic you would take any positive amount.

And put us both in charge.

Human beings behaved the way they behaved, decided the way they decided, driven by an amalgam of genes and impulses and evolution and instincts and drives and mysterious unconscious controllers that fooled the conscience into believing it was in charge.

Spilling blood to protect the homeland was one thing. But spilling blood, only to then vacate hard-won gains on a whim and leave a vacuum that ended up making the problem far worse, was another.

Neville Chamberlain, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in a letter.

the group does not accept a simple majority as a proper basis for action.

For all practical decision-making purposes, we need to treat measurement as observations that quantitatively reduce uncertainty.

we know that decision makers will experience an increase in confidence in their decisions even when the analysis or information-gathering methods are found to be ineffectual. This is part of what Dawes called the "illusion of learning.

For all practical decision-making purposes, we need to treat measurement as observations that quantitatively reduce uncertainty. A mere reduction, not necessarily elimination, of uncertainty will suffice for a measurement.

whether a finding is statistically significant is not the same thing as whether your current state of uncertainty is less than it was before or what the economic value of that uncertainty reduction would be.