So, how do you feel about this: If you are an atheist, you are at loss.
According to Pascal, if God exist then the rewards of believing in God are numerous (contrary to not believing). If he does not exist, then neither theist nor atheist lost or gained anything.
Confused? Well, I was more confused when I started to read about decision theory. I am not going to get into lecture on decision theory (I'll not be able to anyway). But, I learned that decision theory is about making a choice (Decision!) under uncertainty.
Today I felt as if I usually make wrong judgment calls - joining a start-up right before economy started to doom or selling dollars after $ moved from its 52 week high! When I look at the other side of it, benefits from joining start-up (not going into personal details) were huge too. But that good feeling that comes when benefits are availed has passed. Now, challenges of a start-up (bench time, furlough days) are beefing up and throwing me back to the days when I made that choice.
As per veterans, decisions should be well informed. However, most of the times decisions are to be made in uncertain circumstances. I recently read Micheal Useem's book "The go point". The book clearly delineated the process of making decisions with illustrations and practical examples and is a must read. However, now I am looking for something that can tell me how to evaluate decisions you took five or ten years back. Lets see what decision theory has in its kitty...
1 comment:
Read through some decision theory (DT) articles and presentations. Well, I think its more of a subject than literature. I did understand though that there are two types of DTs - Normative and Descriptive. I thought that Normative is more literature like DT but I was not really correct.
Interesting thing was how to decide whether to play a bet or not(inherently, make a choice). Say you are on TV playing a game and you just won a million dollars. Now the next bet is that on toss of a coin and with million dollars on bet - either you make three millions or you lose everything. Would you continue with this bet? -Most probably NO!
What if the player is Warren Buffet or Bill Gates? - They will probably play it. This is because an addition of million or three wont make much of a difference to their wealth. However, you would miss fortune of life if you bet million dollars and lose.
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