Musings on collective decision-making.
The world is a complex place- a complex system in fact. To put it another way, reality unfolds according to the interplay of so many factors that it is physically impossible to model it accurately. This is why weather prediction tends not to be meaningful more than a few hours in advance.
Most of the high level issues with which a political or business leader must contend exhibit similar complexity; every possible course of action yields outcomes that cannot be predicted with certainty, due to the complex interplay of causal relationships that are influenced by said action. A wise decision-maker therefore recognises that most important questions do not have a 'right' or 'wrong' answer. This realisation does nothing to inspire confidence in one's ability to make decisions in the first place.
By contrast, consider an individual who, either through an unwillingness to take account of all the relevant information, or a lack of capacity to do so, fails to perceive the inherent complexity of a given problem, and the many caveats that must accompany any possible solution to it. To this individual, who, willfully or otherwise, models complex problems as simple ones, a 'right' or 'wrong' answer can readily be perceived to most questions. Their decisions will fail to account for all relevant factors of course, making them decidedly unreliable, but their view of the world will not suffer the uncertainty that plagues the wise decision-maker, and their confidence will not thus be undermined.
I therefore propose that strong opinions on complex issues are the preserve of those with poor reasoning skills, while good reasoning skills yield a recognition of uncertainty and a corresponding tendency to indecisiveness. If we assume that this relationship is approximately linear, then
OD = K
where O is a measure of how opinionated an individual is, D a measure of the quality of their decision making ability (essentially how amenable to reason they are), and K is a constant.
Assuming this relation to hold true across humanity in general, the overall effect one might expect to observe is a society disproportionately influenced by the most opinionated, and thus least rational. Said society would therefore behave in a manner suggestive of a collective reasoning ability well below that of the average of its citizens, which I would suggest is consistent with observation.
The world is a complex place- a complex system in fact. To put it another way, reality unfolds according to the interplay of so many factors that it is physically impossible to model it accurately. This is why weather prediction tends not to be meaningful more than a few hours in advance.
Most of the high level issues with which a political or business leader must contend exhibit similar complexity; every possible course of action yields outcomes that cannot be predicted with certainty, due to the complex interplay of causal relationships that are influenced by said action. A wise decision-maker therefore recognises that most important questions do not have a 'right' or 'wrong' answer. This realisation does nothing to inspire confidence in one's ability to make decisions in the first place.
By contrast, consider an individual who, either through an unwillingness to take account of all the relevant information, or a lack of capacity to do so, fails to perceive the inherent complexity of a given problem, and the many caveats that must accompany any possible solution to it. To this individual, who, willfully or otherwise, models complex problems as simple ones, a 'right' or 'wrong' answer can readily be perceived to most questions. Their decisions will fail to account for all relevant factors of course, making them decidedly unreliable, but their view of the world will not suffer the uncertainty that plagues the wise decision-maker, and their confidence will not thus be undermined.
I therefore propose that strong opinions on complex issues are the preserve of those with poor reasoning skills, while good reasoning skills yield a recognition of uncertainty and a corresponding tendency to indecisiveness. If we assume that this relationship is approximately linear, then
OD = K
where O is a measure of how opinionated an individual is, D a measure of the quality of their decision making ability (essentially how amenable to reason they are), and K is a constant.
Assuming this relation to hold true across humanity in general, the overall effect one might expect to observe is a society disproportionately influenced by the most opinionated, and thus least rational. Said society would therefore behave in a manner suggestive of a collective reasoning ability well below that of the average of its citizens, which I would suggest is consistent with observation.
posted by Iansonuk at 1:15 PM
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