Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions

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Some of the ideas in this book can robustify decisions and reinforce common sense while reducing the role of more unreliable intuitions and instincts when people are not experts in a specific type of decisions (for experts in a specific decision type, intuitions/instincts are much more likely to be valid). But a lot of the book seemed like just an admonition to think more carefully about all key components of a decision, which has some value but was less than I expected somehow. PDF / EPUB File Name: Smart_Choices_-_John_S_Hammond_n_Ralph_L_Keeney.pdf, Smart_Choices_-_John_S_Hammond_n_Ralph_L_Keeney.epub Ask parents to supply a clean water bottle and put a serve of fruit or vegetables in the lunch box every day for Crunch&Sip. Fact: Over 400,000 smart meters are being installed every month and 13.8 million are already operating across Great Britain as of 31 December 2018. (4) Over the next 12 months energy suppliers will continue to ramp up their second generation meter installations. Myth 9: Smart meters can turn off your fridge without you knowing Amber—select carefully—these foods and drinks should not dominate choices and should be avoided in large serve sizes.

Identify the criteria. Most decisions require you to accomplish more than one objective. When buying a car, you may want to maximize fuel economy, minimize cost, maximize comfort, and so on. The rational decision maker will identify all relevant criteria in the decision-making process.The authors suggest the even swap method as a way of systematising comparisons of trade-offs across different objectives, but I didn't get a sense from their examples that this is something that systematically works across different situations. It seems like a half-measure somehow between trying to specify some sort of numeric utility/value function across different objectives which is the official recommendation of decision theory, versus just following your feelings/intuitions for integrating across conflicting objectives. I wasn't fully convinced that it's worth trying to apply this in actual decisions on a regular basis. Harvard Professor Max Bazerman, who has written extensively human misjudgment, suggests something very similar to this approach in his book Judgment in Management Decision Making when he explains the anatomy of decisions. Before we can fully understand judgment, we have to identify the components of the decision-making process that require it. Here are the six steps that Bazerman aruges you should take, either implicitly or explicitly, when applying a rational decision-making process. I suspect for non-experts, the presentation and ideas could be worth 4 stars for providing a more systematic approach to decision making. If you already know rational choice and expected utility theories, this book serves more as a simplified reminder of how to systematically structure your decision making process. Start with clarifying the problem and objectives, search for alternative choices, then evaluate consequences. When possible use some sort of table and even do a spreadsheet to help rank alternatives numerically. The level of informality in explaining things like expected utility/value calculations made the presentation seem less clear and compelling for me, as if you have to search for the main idea between the words. But again, maybe this is better for complete non-experts in decision theory.

Decisions shape our experiences, from choosing which job offer to accept, to buying the right car, to selecting a good accountant. How do we know which choice is the smart one? How can we be consistent and confident in our decisions? In this book from the three leading authorities on decision-making, readers learn how to approach all types of decisions with a simple set of skills developed by professors from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Southern California. We don’t weigh the advantage / disadvantages of each alternative. Because even the best option has a disadvantage and the worst option has an advantage. no more estimated billing – something we only seem to tolerate in utilities – no more having to crawl under the stairs or to take time out of your day to provide manual readings to your supplier New documentary videos enable students to explore real-life topics. Students can practice speaking skills with activities after each video in the Bonus Units.We think one decision is enough. Instead every decision leads to other linked decision requiring equally rigorous algorithm to solve. Consider linked decisions. What you decide today could influence your choices tomorrow, and your goals for tomorrow should influence your choices today. Thus many important decisions are linked over time. … Think hard about your risk tolerance. When decisions involve uncertainties, the desired consequence may not be the one that actually results. A much-deliberated bone marrow transplant may or may not halt cancer. … Discuss the idea of eating fruit and vegetables and drinking water in the classroom with students. Discussion topics could include the amount of fruit, vegetables and water students currently eat; the importance of fruit, vegetables and water as part of a healthy diet and to help learning; or favourite fruit and vegetables. Despite books like this being in the market, even for free on the internet, people are still groping in the darkness of life trying in vain to get the best possible outcomes. However great outcomes such as success, wealth, peace come from decisions. This book explains to us that the many times we:

Most of the advice here is basically various forms of: think carefully about the objectives, alternative choices and consequences. The main aids in the book besides common sense and whatever data one can find e.g on the web or from experts are the recommendation to do a consequences table (matrix of alternatives and consequences for key objectives of each alternative), and maybe attempting an expected utility/value calculation for important decisions. The authors explicitly reject as a bias any tendency to assign higher probabilities to negative events as a precaution, but the more recent decision theory literature suggests this could be a good practice to account for rational ambiguity or robustness. The most recent theories of rational choice suggest robust multiple priors models as maybe more rational than expected utility using a single probability distribution or Bayesian model combination. Crunch&Sip is a time during the school day when students can 'refuel' on fruit and salad vegetables and 'rehydrate' with water. Each day, students bring a piece of fruit or salad vegetables to school to eat during Crunch&Sip. In addition, each student has a small bottle of plain water to drink throughout the day to prevent dehydration. Create imaginative alternatives.… Remember: your decision can be no better than your best alternative. … The PrOACT decision making model was developed by John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa. They described how to make a decision using the PrOACT model in the book Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions.The book essentially breaks down rational choice/decision theory into key components: the problem, objectives, choice alternatives, consequences. It adds uncertainty, risk attitudes and future interactions with other choices only at the end, even though for approximately all key life choices these aspects are significant and unavoidable. Smart meters also communicate directly with your energy supplier meaning you will get accurate bills and only pay for what you use without the hassle of providing meter readings yourself or taking time out of your day to let the meter reader in.