Abstract
What is most frustrating about intelligent decision-making is that it looks so easy. It’s not a matter of intelligence or common sense alone; something must be frequently interfering with the process. We are all obviously endowed with more than the required IQ to make good decisions — or at least better than the failures we frequently learn about through the media. Often this is not the case of superior wisdom provided by hindsight. Many decisions are fairly stupid, both a priori or after the fact.
I was a-trembling because I’d got to decide forever betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied for a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’
(Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ch. 31)
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References
Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision — Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1971).
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© 1993 Emilio Cvitkovic
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Cvitkovic, E. (1993). Decisions, Decisions. In: Competition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12857-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12857-0_5
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