RichardSRussell (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} richardsrussell) wrote,@ 2008-03-07 10:48:00 |
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How We Decide, Part 1
Heretofore, I’ve simply been reacting to Kurt Williamsen’s original article. But now I do some original work of my own as I lay out a systematic analysis of the basic problem that underlies Williamsen’s thot processes:
Everybody makes hundreds of decisions every day. Some of those are good decisions, some bad, but the great majority are simply routine. You walk into the bathroom early in the morning and, without spending any noticeable time on it, decide to flip on the light switch, something you’ve done so often it’s habitual.
But somewhere along the line, perhaps on the very 1st morning you woke up in that house, you had to make that light-switch decision for the 1st time ever. At that point, you invested a little bit of thot in it. This essay is about decisions like that, the kind where you consciously work thru the question before arriving at a conclusion.
THE FACTORY
Let’s think of decision-making as being akin to an industrial plant — an idea factory, if you will — where inputs go thru a process to get turned into outputs. We can sketch it like this:
Inputs —> Process —> Outputs
Because I’m mainly interested in the middle part, let’s quickly dispose of the 2 ends.
OUTPUTS
The results of decision-making are things we do, say, think, and believe. Outputs also include several things which occur below (or perhaps outside of) the level of conscious thought: emotions, esthetics, and habits. These are, of course, a vital part of human existence, but they don’t involve conscious thot, so I’m going to skip them.
INPUTS
There are several types of inputs into decisions, each with its own problems.
(A) Definitions. Words are labels for concepts. We use words to make it easier to comprehend and manipulate the concepts. That makes it essential that we know which word goes with which concept, and that’s sometimes harder than it sounds. For example, consider the word “light”. It’s perhaps the most versatile word in the English language, with over a hundred meanings, in every possible part of speech. Just in the sciences, it can mean:
• the opposite of heavy (adjective, mechanics),
• what a bird does on a limb (intransitive verb, ornithology),
• a visible form of electromagnetic radiation (noun, optics), or
• ignite, as with a Bunsen burner (transitive verb, chemistry).
Often the meaning of the word will be clear from context, but it’s always a good idea, when getting into complex, knotty issues with people you might disagree with, to be sure you’ve agreed on a common set of definitions right from the outset.
(B) Axioms. These are glorified assumptions. The glory comes from several different sources. Axioms are:
• universal — they apply everywhere, and everyone agrees on them
• reliable — no exceptions have ever been observed
• fundamental — can’t be explained in terms of anything simpler
Perhaps the best known set of axioms are the 5 axioms of Giuseppe Peano, from which the entire theory of natural numbers can be derived. Euclid’s axioms and postulates also form the basis for a complete understanding of plane geometry.
However, outside of abstract fields like mathematics and symbolic logic, axioms are very difficult to come by.
(C) Ordinary Assumptions. Into absolutely every decision goes at least 1 assumption (usually many more). Assumptions are notoriously unreliable. You may have heard the old joke about the word “assume”, which is derived from a process which makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”. Yet they are also unavoidable. For example, into every decision you personally make about what course of action you intend to pursue is the assumption that you will be alive to pursue it. In the discussion of processes which follows, we will see that formal logic tries diligently to state its assumptions explicitly, as premises. This is by far the exception; most assumptions are unstated or implicit.
(D) Genetics. You have no wings, so you can’t fly. You have no gills, so you can’t breathe underwater. It’s also likely that your brain is wired in such a way that there are some thots that you simply are unable to think. These probably vary from one individual to another, and they’re almost impossible to measure. To some extent, the limitations of genetics can be overcome by diligent training, but there are limits imposed on us by nature that we’ll never overcome.
(E) Sensations. Sensory input is extremely valuable but also fallible. As part of a demo I use in my database classes, I hold up 3 pieces of paper, stapled together with a plastic overlay, and ask the class what color each piece of paper is. The shortest piece, in front, appears to be yellow; the medium-length one, in the middle, looks orange; and the full-size sheet in back is green. At least, that’s the way it looks until I flip up the piece of yellow plastic in front of them, and they’re revealed to be white, pink, and blue.
This is just one of many ways in which you might be misled by your senses. Of course, there’s a “but wait” part to the story as well, which is that it was also our senses which gave us the true picture behind the misleading façade. So rigorous attention to detail can produce a substantial improvement on our original casual sensory input. Can we ever be sure it’s perfectly accurate? No.
(F) Memories. Your recollections of your own life experiences get hauled out when something trips the trigger of association in your brain that says “Hey, this new thing is like that old thing.”. Memories, too, are sometimes unreliable but provide an unavoidable context for your decisions.
(G) Testimony, also known as “other people’s memories”. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. Personal testimony is one of those curious things that has a great reputation which is completely unwarranted. Yet, despite its being colored by the testifier’s expectations and biases, it too serves as a form of input to the decision-making process — just one that we need to be cautious about.
All these things get fed into the hopper at one end of our factory. Then they pass thru 1 of 8 gates to undergo some kind of process that produces decisions at the other end. I’ll look at those 8 processes tomoro.
Tomoro: How We Decide, Part 2
Heretofore, I’ve simply been reacting to Kurt Williamsen’s original article. But now I do some original work of my own as I lay out a systematic analysis of the basic problem that underlies Williamsen’s thot processes:
Everybody makes hundreds of decisions every day. Some of those are good decisions, some bad, but the great majority are simply routine. You walk into the bathroom early in the morning and, without spending any noticeable time on it, decide to flip on the light switch, something you’ve done so often it’s habitual.
But somewhere along the line, perhaps on the very 1st morning you woke up in that house, you had to make that light-switch decision for the 1st time ever. At that point, you invested a little bit of thot in it. This essay is about decisions like that, the kind where you consciously work thru the question before arriving at a conclusion.
Let’s think of decision-making as being akin to an industrial plant — an idea factory, if you will — where inputs go thru a process to get turned into outputs. We can sketch it like this:
Inputs —> Process —> Outputs
Because I’m mainly interested in the middle part, let’s quickly dispose of the 2 ends.
The results of decision-making are things we do, say, think, and believe. Outputs also include several things which occur below (or perhaps outside of) the level of conscious thought: emotions, esthetics, and habits. These are, of course, a vital part of human existence, but they don’t involve conscious thot, so I’m going to skip them.
There are several types of inputs into decisions, each with its own problems.
(A) Definitions. Words are labels for concepts. We use words to make it easier to comprehend and manipulate the concepts. That makes it essential that we know which word goes with which concept, and that’s sometimes harder than it sounds. For example, consider the word “light”. It’s perhaps the most versatile word in the English language, with over a hundred meanings, in every possible part of speech. Just in the sciences, it can mean:
• the opposite of heavy (adjective, mechanics),
• what a bird does on a limb (intransitive verb, ornithology),
• a visible form of electromagnetic radiation (noun, optics), or
• ignite, as with a Bunsen burner (transitive verb, chemistry).
Often the meaning of the word will be clear from context, but it’s always a good idea, when getting into complex, knotty issues with people you might disagree with, to be sure you’ve agreed on a common set of definitions right from the outset.
(B) Axioms. These are glorified assumptions. The glory comes from several different sources. Axioms are:
• universal — they apply everywhere, and everyone agrees on them
• reliable — no exceptions have ever been observed
• fundamental — can’t be explained in terms of anything simpler
Perhaps the best known set of axioms are the 5 axioms of Giuseppe Peano, from which the entire theory of natural numbers can be derived. Euclid’s axioms and postulates also form the basis for a complete understanding of plane geometry.
However, outside of abstract fields like mathematics and symbolic logic, axioms are very difficult to come by.
(C) Ordinary Assumptions. Into absolutely every decision goes at least 1 assumption (usually many more). Assumptions are notoriously unreliable. You may have heard the old joke about the word “assume”, which is derived from a process which makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”. Yet they are also unavoidable. For example, into every decision you personally make about what course of action you intend to pursue is the assumption that you will be alive to pursue it. In the discussion of processes which follows, we will see that formal logic tries diligently to state its assumptions explicitly, as premises. This is by far the exception; most assumptions are unstated or implicit.
(D) Genetics. You have no wings, so you can’t fly. You have no gills, so you can’t breathe underwater. It’s also likely that your brain is wired in such a way that there are some thots that you simply are unable to think. These probably vary from one individual to another, and they’re almost impossible to measure. To some extent, the limitations of genetics can be overcome by diligent training, but there are limits imposed on us by nature that we’ll never overcome.
(E) Sensations. Sensory input is extremely valuable but also fallible. As part of a demo I use in my database classes, I hold up 3 pieces of paper, stapled together with a plastic overlay, and ask the class what color each piece of paper is. The shortest piece, in front, appears to be yellow; the medium-length one, in the middle, looks orange; and the full-size sheet in back is green. At least, that’s the way it looks until I flip up the piece of yellow plastic in front of them, and they’re revealed to be white, pink, and blue.
This is just one of many ways in which you might be misled by your senses. Of course, there’s a “but wait” part to the story as well, which is that it was also our senses which gave us the true picture behind the misleading façade. So rigorous attention to detail can produce a substantial improvement on our original casual sensory input. Can we ever be sure it’s perfectly accurate? No.
(F) Memories. Your recollections of your own life experiences get hauled out when something trips the trigger of association in your brain that says “Hey, this new thing is like that old thing.”. Memories, too, are sometimes unreliable but provide an unavoidable context for your decisions.
(G) Testimony, also known as “other people’s memories”. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. Personal testimony is one of those curious things that has a great reputation which is completely unwarranted. Yet, despite its being colored by the testifier’s expectations and biases, it too serves as a form of input to the decision-making process — just one that we need to be cautious about.
All these things get fed into the hopper at one end of our factory. Then they pass thru 1 of 8 gates to undergo some kind of process that produces decisions at the other end. I’ll look at those 8 processes tomoro.
Tomoro: How We Decide, Part 2
