On Choices, and Making Decisions. People always say that it's good to have choices, and most of the time, they're right.But sometimes, having to choose can be a curse, especially when there is no obvious option.... it becomes an exercise of weighing tradeoffs and second-guessing yourself. This process can get torturous, and some people go to great lengths to avoid thinking about it. They tend to either pick a choice randomly after pushing off the decision until the latest moment, or go with the popular vote.
For some of the decisions we have to make, (picking which brand to buy, where to eat) we don't really care about what choice we make, but for others, we care a lot. (where to move to, who to marry, what to do for a living, etc.) I've recently had to make an important decision, and it was hard to pick among the choices. Below are some of the things I did and questions that I asked to come to my choice. 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.) 5.) 6.) And..... that's it for now. Conversation with Daniel Kahneman, cover page. Disclosing Bias Doesn’t Cancel Its Effects. Life With Alacrity: Systems for Collective Choice. By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline [Shannon Appelcline is a friend and colleague of mine at Skotos, an online game company.
Over the last few years we've had many discussions about how decisions are made, and how our society collectively makes choices. The origin of these discussions have varied from "what makes this board game work? ", to "how can we give our players more control of our online games? ", to "how do we make decisions in our company?
", and of course "how did we collectively make such a mess of decision making in America? ". Collective choice systems have been around for a long time. The Internet expands this long history of collective choice. Before any analysis can occur, however, there is a need for a categorization of systems and a definition of terms. Broadly, there seem to be three methods of collective choice, divided by the intended result: selection, opinion, or comparison. Selection Systems Each voter ranks at least one candidate in order of preference. ... Murray Turoff's Homepage. Background Other Interests: Gardening (Alpine and Rock Gardens, Sedums, Heaths & Heathers, Rhodos and Azaleas, Dwarf Conifers), Outdoors (Hiking, Scuba Diving & Snorkeling, Kayaking) Science Fiction Disaster Books and other Historical Insight books in dealing with difficult decisions and situations Course Materials Available: The following courses are offered face to face and/or online by an appropriate bulletin-board/conferencing system that allows the facilitation of asynchronous online discussions by the students.
PowerPoint material and audio mp3 recordings. Undergraduate Courses: IS 413 Requirements Analysis for Emergency Management Information Systems IS 455 Management of Computer Systems IS 477 Human Computer Interface Design Same Syllabus and course notes as for IS 732 (see below) Graduate Courses (can include senior undergraduates or honor upper division undergraduates in a graduate offering): IS 732 Design of Interactive Systems Graduate Course at CUNY: Recent Books Hiltz, S.
V. Collaborative Decision-Making. From Aniket (Niki) Kittur (our visiting scientist in the group): Found an interesting paper presented at HICSS (Rodriguez, 2007) talking about a social network system for collective decision making. Basically (to avoid reading the paper), the authors developed a social network in which users could express different degrees of trust for each other. The system could be used to make a collective decision on a posed question, e.g., “What should be done in xxx situation?” They tested three algorithms, each of which was aimed for a different dynamic: 1) Direct democracy (everyone gets a vote, if you don’t vote your vote is lost) 2) Dynamic distributed democracy (everyone gets a vote, if you don’t vote it passes to a person you trust; if they don’t vote it passes to a person they trust; onwards until it reaches someone who votes whose vote is then worth two) 3) Proxy (expert) network (everyone gets votes proportional to their in-degree trust links, otherwise same as 2)
Honeybees use range voting! (Return to main page) (Executive Summary) (Bonobos) Go to the bee, thou poet; consider her ways, and be wise. . – George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903. ...these homeless insects do something truly amazing; they hold a democratic debate to choose their new home. – Thomas Dyer Seeley, Honeybee democracy, 2010. Honeybees (Apis Mellifera jpg) have been "voting" in single-winner "elections" for 20-50 million years.
They've held far more elections than humans, for a lot longer, and to decide something that mattered to each bee voter a lot more than most election winners matter to most human voters: where should we locate our new nest? With computers we can easily run millions of simulated elections, but even that number is dwarfed by the number of elections that bees have experienced, which exceeds hundreds of trillions. So it behooves us to ask: what election method do bees use? Bee election performance – how good are they? So bees, while not perfect decision makers, are quite good. Honesty: New study shows how often juries get it wrong. Public release date: 28-Jun-2007 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Pat Vaughan Tremmelp-tremmel@northwestern.edu 847-491-4892Northwestern University EVANSTON, Ill. --- Juries across the country make decisions every day on the fate of defendants, ideally leading to prison sentences that fit the crime for the guilty and release for the innocent.
Yet a new Northwestern University study shows that juries in criminal cases many times are getting it wrong. In a set of 271 cases from four areas, juries gave wrong verdicts in at least one out of eight cases, according to “Estimating the Accuracy of Jury Verdicts,” a paper by a Northwestern University statistician that is being published in the July issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.
Spencer cautions that the numerical findings should not be generalized to broader sets of cases, for which additional study would be needed, but the study strongly suggests that jury verdicts can be studied statistically. . [ Print | E-mail. The Major » Wikipedia decision making. Dec 6th, 2005 by FourMajor | No Comments » Today, it was announced that Wikipedia is restricting article creation to registered users only.
Many might choose to argue one position or the other on this issue. I happen to not feel strongly either way. However, I find the process by which it was decided to be questionable. A week after being contacted by John Seigenthaler Sr. about an inaccurate article, Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia) made the change to an official built-in policy of Wikipedia. He logged on to the Wikipedia chat to discuss the change, but it is clear that this was not required prior to making his decision. Wikipedia is: a multi-lingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. Because of its very nature, it is clear that Wikipedia should not be considered to be owned or controlled by one man alone.
Of course, this situation would be different if elections were held for every position. Post Revisions: There are no revisions for this post. Home.