Estimates vs. head-to-head comparisons

12 paulfchristiano 04 May 2013 06:45AM

(Cross-posted from my blog.)

Summary: when choosing between two options, it’s not always optimal to estimate the value of each option and then pick the better one.

Suppose I am choosing between two actions, X and Y. One way to make my decision is to predict what will happen if I do X and predict what will happen if I do Y, and then pick the option which leads to the outcome that I prefer.

My predictions may be both vague and error-prone, and my value judgments might be very hard or nearly arbitrary. But it seems like I ultimately must make some predictions, and must decide how valuable the different outcomes are. So if I have to evaluate N options, I could do it by evaluating the goodness of each option, and then simply picking the option with the highest value. Right?

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Overcoming the mind-killer

10 woozle 17 March 2010 12:56AM

I've been asked to start a thread in order to continue a debate I started in the comments of an otherwise-unrelated post. I started to write a post on that topic, found myself introducing my work by way of explanation, and then realized that this was a sub-topic all its own which is of substantial relevance to at least one of the replies to my comments in that post -- and a much better topic for a first-ever post/thread .

So I'm going to write that introductory post first, and then start another thread specifically on the topic under debate.

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