Quotes About Decision-making

Craig wondered if the landlord knew exactly what was going on up there. If he did, he might not have been so quick to let them use it. On the other hand, the prospect of selling a few extra pints on a slow Monday night might tempt even the best of us to leave our ethics and politics at the door.

In contrast to the modern view that religious doubt is something to reject, fear or merely tolerate, doubt not only can be seen as an inevitable aspect of our humanity but also can be celebrated as a vital part of faith. Doubt has often been disparaged, or merely tolerated, because it is seen as leading to an inert state of undecidability in which nothing can be believed or acted upon. Yet in reality it is only in the midst of undecidability that real decisions can be made.

One piece of advice that I would give people playing pick-and-prays

most people would rather feel guilty than feel helpless.

The art of war lies in calculating the odds very closely to begin with, and then in adding exactly, almost mathematically, the factor of chance. Chance

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

My bosses would tell you that I've often acted as a sounding board for them. With all three of my bosses, we've mentored each other, although the obvious balance of wisdom and expertise was theirs. I was always helpful to them in their decisions about customer problems.

GRUNTS LOOK THE ENEMY IN THE EYE. GRUNTS KNOW THE STAKES. GRUNTS KNOW THE PRICE OF POOR STRATEGY. WHAT DO THE GENERALS KNOW? OVERLAYS AND TACTICAL PLOTS. THE WHOLE CHAIN OF COMMAND IS UPSIDE-DOWN. –KENNETH LUBIN, ZERO SUM

hyperbolic discounting, and

Cuando no se puede resolver un problema, se crea un comité de expertos, según dijo una vez un político.

I'M PLAYING LOOSE — Game: Average 2 players before the flop Action: First to the pot, and raising Players: 9- to 10-handed

Eighty percent of all choices are based on fear. Most people don't choose what they want they choose what they think is safe.

We are all forecasters. When we think about changing jobs, getting married, buying a home, making an investment, launching a product, or retiring, we decide based on how we expect the future will unfold.

Maxims Hidden in the Text Try, fail, analyze, adjust, try again. John Maynard Keynes cycled through these steps ceaselessly. 178 An imperfect decision made in time is better than a perfect one made too late. 215-216 Plans are merely a platform for change. Israeli Defense Forces slogan. 222 If we ask many tiny pertinent questions, we can close in on an answer for the big question. 263

If forecasters can keep questioning themselves and their teammates, and welcome vigorous debate, the group can become more than the sum of its parts.

Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that's hindsight bias.

That is normal human behavior. We tend to go with strong hunches. System 1 follows a primitive psycho-logic: if it feels true, it is. In the Paleolithic world in which our brains evolved, that's not a bad way of making decisions. Gathering

A defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based.

In his 1972 classic, Victims of Groupthink, the psychologist Irving Janis—one of my PhD advisers at Yale long ago—explored the decision making that went into both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.

Popular books often draw a dichotomy between intuition and analysis—"blink" versus "think"—and pick one or the other as the way to go. I am more of a thinker than a blinker, but blink-think is another false dichotomy. The choice isn't either/or, it is how to blend them in evolving situations.

Kahneman and other pioneers of modern psychology have revealed that our minds crave certainty and when they don't find it, they impose it.

After the fiasco, Kennedy ordered an inquiry to figure out how his people could have botched it so badly. It identified cozy unanimity as the key problem and recommended changes to the decision-making process to ensure it could never develop again.

Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person.

No one played devil's advocate, a figure that every group needs to avoid foolish or even disastrous decisions like this. It was reminiscent of President John Kennedy's "disastrous" decision to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.11