The Art of Critical Decision Making is a new 12-hour lecture series (audio and video) available from The Teaching Company, available as an audio MP3 download for $35.  After May 14 it will cost $130.

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7 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 4:54 PM

The site seems to indicate that there's a video version, but that you can't download it (you have to buy a DVD). Regardless of how good the audio version is, the existence of an audio+video version greatly reduces my subjective valuation of the audio version; it makes me feel like I should withhold my listening time until they offer the video version for download too. Distributing video files isn't free, but it's a trivial expense compared to the purchase price.

I never even consider video. I get audio and listen to it in my car, or while out walking, or cleaning the house, or on the subway, or while chopping up more books to scan them in to OCR them, text-to-speech them, and make MP3s from them. I get videos from the library and rip them to MP3. Yesterday I was converting video from the Machine Learning 2006 conference into MP3.

I have a long commute.

Do people on LW consider time/life optimization part of LW rationality?

The only Teaching Company course for which I found the video to be important is the anatomy lecture series. They won't release a course as audio if they think the video is important.

Has anybody listened to this? Is it worth the price?

While we are on the subject of advertisements for things on decision making we technically haven't read: Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide.

I haven't read the book (I just got it today), but Lehrer's blog, Frontal Cortex is one of the top psych/neuro blogs out there and his interest in decision-making runs along pretty much the same track as ours.

Have you listened to it?

No - it's brand new. But I've listened to dozens of lectures from The Teaching Company. 90% of them are excellent.

Is this like posting a link to an article that you haven't read? Maybe. A key difference being that 1) I have prior experience with the high quality of TTC products, and 2) if I waited until I've listened to it, the sale would be over and it would cost $130.

Hi, just wondering if anyone has actually listened to it yet, and what do they think??? I'm 3/4 of the way through, and have done a lot of the ttc courses, but am surprised at how dull/obvious this course seems to be. While some parts of it are potentially interesting (like cognitive biases and such), the majority of the course seems rife with neologisms as proffered by business managers (I actually groaned when the lecturer mentioned a "pre-mortem" analysis).

I do however think they got the title right, it's definitely not the "science" of decision making, because although it is based on case studies it comes across as very simplistic and at times often vague and uncritical. It could however just be aimed at business manager types, so this may just be me comparing it to some of the more hardcore ttc courses I love (my favourite would have to be the Philosophy of Science). Thoughts, opinions? Phil.