(2007-01-30) Pollard Decision Making

Dave Pollard on Decision Making, with references to James Surowiecki's Wisdom Of Crowds. Surowiecki identifies five types of decisions that qualified (reasonably informed, diverse, independent) "crowds" are especially competent at....Crowds are not particularly good at imagining solutions to problems, or knowing which tools and methods to use to solve them - creative groups and individuals are better at these elements of decision-making... Collective decisions also tend to give greater weight to intellectual knowledge than perceptual, emotional, and intuitive knowledge, because of its perceived "objectivity" (and hence simpler process of achieving understanding and agreement on its veracity)... Nowhere is this prejudice for intellectual knowledge more evident than in the new field of "EvidenceBased decision-making"... Evidence is, after all, a loaded word. What we call evidence is the data that we personally find useful in a particular Context, and in Complex System-s we all have different contexts and perspectives, so we will never agree on what is appropriate evidence, or on what the evidence "means".