The Decision Strategist

This article in the New York Times talks about differences in intelligence and making mistakes. Intelligence is a funny thing. It’s a concept that there is no real way to measure. Perhaps because there is no real consensus on what intelligence means. Is intelligence being able to interpret geometrical shapes? Or perhaps being able to understand the concepts in a paragraph (Who’s concepts? What language and subject?)? Perhaps intelligence is being able to interpret body language to understand emotions? Maybe it’s making decisions that are least destructive to our health, in which case all smokers are less intelligent than non-smokers.

At risk of treading dangerously close to ‘everything is relative’ territory, I think it is very hard to judge intelligence. Is a drug user who robs a store not being intelligent? Does being a drug addict in the first place have anything to do with intelligence? In fact, does breaking any laws of any kind have anything to do with intelligence?

I think intelligence has little to do with your genetic gifts and more to do with how hard you work to understand things. If you tend to face unknown or confusing situations by saying ‘meh, nevermind I am not really interested’ or ‘this is too hard’ it almost certainly will be. But if you face those situations by asking what you can learn, pretty soon those situations aren’t as hard as they first seemed.

In other words, I think the human bell-curve of intelligence looks something like this:

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If measures of intelligence are dependent on cultural values, we can be assured that they discriminate against groups with different values. Someone who was raised with the idea of getting married and having a family over going to college is not by definition any less smart than the upper class kid who was raised to go to Harvard.

But we as a society seem to think that intelligence is an objective measure, like the length of a board or the size of a hard drive. Whether you rate someone else as intelligent probably has a lot more to do with how closely their values align with yours than it does with how much processing power they possesses. People don’t like the idea that you can’t assign a number to someones intelligence, or that that number will depend more on whether the person was raised in line with the dominant world view or not.

It’s a weird culture of fear that we have. Even those of us who are critical of what we might call ‘consumer values’ are afraid of the person who is homeless, or the person who is living in the projects. The reality is that people in substantially different walks of life probably have a lot of interesting things to say if we could just overcome our fear of crime and self-protective disdain.

Part of the problem with writing articles over multiple sessions is that you pick up in a very different place from where you left off. I hope this all makes some kind of sense.

-zot.

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I’ve been thinking about decision making for over six years, and sometimes I start to wonder: do decision making techniques really work?

All this talk about decision making errors, how the neuroscience of our brains contributes to subtle and undetectable assumptions and errors, makes me think that there is little we can do to make conscious adjustments to improve our decision making.

Every decision making technique I’ve discussed to this point works by forcing us to explicitly consider each option, it’s positives and negatives or how it compares to other options.

But inherent in those simple methods is that every positive and negative factor, every comparison between options, incorporates our subconscious decision making errors.

In my personal SWOT analysis, I had an easier time coming up with strengths than weaknesses when thinking about myself, but was better at thinking of threats than opportunities when thinking about the external situation. Is that the truth of the situation, or is that because it’s easier for us to criticize others than ourselves?

While trying to figure out what to do with my life, I listed more positive things for the options I already preferred. Is that because they really are better, or because I am trying to avoid cognitive dissonance?

When I…you get my point.

In all our decisions, it is difficult (and possibly impossible) to subjectively know whether we made the decision based on reasons, or whether we created the reasons to justify our decision. Research is showing the latter.

But if that’s true, have we already made the decision before we even start any decision making techniques? In the exercises I’ve done here I’ve usually had a few insights while I’m working through my a decision technique, but I don’t know that it has ever changed the outcome of my decision.

Are decision making techniques just another layer of justification for a decision we’ve already made?

The one thing that gives me hope is the influence that different experiences can have on our implicit associations. If we can at least change our socially learned biases, maybe some improvement can be made.

Just food for thought.

-zot

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Have you ever noticed how many issues we consider to be a line between two polar opposites? Liberal and Conservative, good and evil, against the war and for the war, against and for any issues or group really, in a relationship or not in a relationship, pro-life or pro-chocie…you get my point.

We experience a world of false dichotomies.

But worse, we like them. We like situations that are views as a choice between two opposites because it makes our decision easy. We don’t have to consider all the different factors that should affect our decision. It also meshes well with whatever story we are telling ourselves and allows no room for ambiguity. And it is the most effective form of rhetoric.

In short, it reduces the possibility of experiencing cognitive dissonance (wikipedia).

But the real world is almost always more complicated than that. Our tendency to think in dichotomies makes us especially susceptible to manipulation and decision making errors.

• Framing Effects. Presenting situations as a dichotomy allows people to frame the debate in such a way that they cannot lose.
• Metaphorical Thinking. Along with framing effects, we respond more emotionally to dichotomies, and quickly identify ourselves with the position we want to be associated with.
• If-Then Fallacy. It is already easy for us to fall prey to the if-then fallacy, but if we are thinking of a choice as a dichotomy, it is even easier. If-then fallacies work by getting us to accept the initial if statement, which conditions us to accept the then statement even if it has no relation to the if statement.

One common false dichotomy is commonly referred to Morton’s Fork. Morton’s Fork is a situation in which you have to choose between two unpleasant options. Often this is a false dichotomy and there are a number of other solutions to a problem that aren’t being considered.

The result is statements like these:

“It’s either get a divorce or stay in an unhappy marriage.”

“I hate my job but I can’t leave it.”

“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

“Either we fire more workers or we reduce the pension plan.”

“We were either created by intelligent design or by evolution.”

There are numerous others (of course sometimes a dichotomy isn’t false, I don’t mean to suggest that evolution is a debatable topic for serious people).

When making decisions, especially ones that are emotionally difficult or seem to have no good option, it can be helpful to remember that there are probably options you haven’t considered. If you’re only considering two diametrically opposed choices, what options are available that occupy a middle ground? What other dimensions of criteria are there that might expand the number of available choices?

-zot.

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Anyone who has worked with statistics, models, or data of any form has probably run into the situation where someone wants a measure for something regardless of how useful that measure is.

Maybe it’s some version of the conjunction fallacy or other decision making error: A number gives us confidence regardless of how useful the number is.

Or maybe, like valuing the status quo over innovation, it’s a liability issue. Workers and managers want to be able to cover their own ass if something goes wrong. In such cases it’s always better to have some numbers, regardless of how applicable they are.

My bet is on the second reason, and it’s ruining the world.

Take an abysmal measure of inflation: the CPI. Granted inflation is a difficult thing to measure, but there are several bad problems that only make things worse.

The same goes for GDP, unemployment rates (or here or wikipedia) and basically any other measure of economic activity.

But maybe other disciplines aren’t like that? Don’t bet on it.

A friend of mine who is an accountant says that there is enough error and flexibility in accounting rules to make most balance sheets suspect. Consider the value of goodwill and brand value (look at that equation).

Measures of worker efficiency, political polls and statistics in scientific research all have regular problems.

Earlier I was talking about ourreference and discuss our tendency to slap a measure on everything, but the effect is that it causes us to shift our focus to maximizing the measure rather than what we really want.

As a policy analyst, I run into the ‘a garbage number is better than no number’ mind frame regularly. Government officials and big companies, the havens of bureaucracy need a number to justify their decisions. They need something to protect themselves if something goes wrong.

The problem isn’t really that we want to rely on numbers. It’s that we’re making big, important decisions based on numbers that have high measures of error at best or are just plain irrelevant at worst.

Our desire to cover our own ass is causing us to make bad decisions. In complex, important decisions the situation is always more nuanced than the reduction to measures indicates. But we can’t cover our ass if we make a decision based on a judgment call after considering all the complexities of the situation. That is an opinion and is open to dispute.

Yet what do we miss by relying on approximations so heavily? We miss all the subtle implications of the situation that can’t be measured easily or that get lost in the aggregation of data.

We often forego the time and effort of gaining a deeper understanding of a decision in the name of cost and efficiency. For small decisions it might be worth it to search less and ignore more information. But for large policy decisions it is almost certainly worth the effort of getting more information.

So to conclude this long rant (my apologies), lets reflect a bit on the importance of considering things that can’t be quantified, interactions that can’t be written down in a list, and factors that may only be known to us subconsciously.

Our reliance on numbers as the ultimate truth is ultimately misguided.

-zot

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