Talk:Decision-making/Archives/2013

"Previously unpublished synthesis" tag

Somebody put this tag on the article, with a rather cryptic edit summary. I don't have a problem with the tag, but I'm wondering what this is all about. Lou Sander (talk) 14:19, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Because I saw this edit come up on my watchlist, and I agreed with the IP's sentiment. So rather than revert, I dug up a template that seemed appropriate. I wanted to see if we could get a discussion going around making this article more useful for readers. Right now, it contains a lot of good citations, but the overall organization seems kind of haphazard (e.g. "Information Overload" is its own section, following a fairly detailed discussion of information overload in a previous section--a discussion which links to the article on information overload!).

There are also a lot of ways in which the article is written that I would like to see changed to comply better with our MOS:

• "Decision making techniques can be separated into two broad categories." (weasel words)
• "It is important to differentiate between problem analysis and decision making." (editorializing)
• "Yet, at another level, it might be regarded as a problem solving activity which is terminated when a satisfactory solution is reached." (original research?)
• "This area of decision making, although it is very old and has attracted the interest of many researchers and practitioners, is still highly debated" (expressions of doubt)

More generally, I think the article is wayyy too jargony to be useful as a general reference about a major concept, and could also be substantially pruned down. Decision-making has been an area of scientific and philosophical inquiry for centuries, but there is little sense of the origins of our conception of decision-making here; mostly we get a bunch of competing theories, and most of them relatively recent. So the article ends up seeming like a clearinghouse of various scientific theories and specialized terminology, without much cohesion or flow. The articles on Cognition and Problem solving (which is linked to from this article, confusingly, as problem analysis) both do a reasonably good job of presenting the basic information about the concepts they describe from various historical, geographical and disciplinary perspectives. I think this article could benefit from a similar approach. But I think to do so we would have to tear it down to its foundations and reconfigure it.

From its edit history, the article has been under extensive development for years, mostly by well-meaning contributors but without much collaboration. If there are two or three others who would want to undertake a re-write, I think we could improve the article substantially. Any takers? - J-Mo ^{Talk to Me} _{Email Me} 21:49, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

I could be involved in this, but I don't want to do any heavy lifting. I'm the major contributor to Analytic hierarchy process, though my expertise in the field came mostly from hammering out the article. I DO have access to experts in AHP and decision making, and I know pretty much about editing Wikipedia. Additionally, there is an ISAHP conference in Washington, DC, in mid-2014, at which they want to talk about the desirability of AHP concepts getting wider use in the world at large. I don't have any AHP axe to grind, but if I were involved in this project, I could maybe take some insights to the ISAHP folks. Lou Sander (talk) 22:43, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

"Previously unpublished synthesis" tag

Somebody put this tag on the article, with a rather cryptic edit summary. I don't have a problem with the tag, but I'm wondering what this is all about. Lou Sander (talk) 14:19, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Because I saw this edit come up on my watchlist, and I agreed with the IP's sentiment. So rather than revert, I dug up a template that seemed appropriate. I wanted to see if we could get a discussion going around making this article more useful for readers. Right now, it contains a lot of good citations, but the overall organization seems kind of haphazard (e.g. "Information Overload" is its own section, following a fairly detailed discussion of information overload in a previous section--a discussion which links to the article on information overload!).

There are also a lot of ways in which the article is written that I would like to see changed to comply better with our MOS:

• "Decision making techniques can be separated into two broad categories." (weasel words)
• "It is important to differentiate between problem analysis and decision making." (editorializing)
• "Yet, at another level, it might be regarded as a problem solving activity which is terminated when a satisfactory solution is reached." (original research?)
• "This area of decision making, although it is very old and has attracted the interest of many researchers and practitioners, is still highly debated" (expressions of doubt)

More generally, I think the article is wayyy too jargony to be useful as a general reference about a major concept, and could also be substantially pruned down. Decision-making has been an area of scientific and philosophical inquiry for centuries, but there is little sense of the origins of our conception of decision-making here; mostly we get a bunch of competing theories, and most of them relatively recent. So the article ends up seeming like a clearinghouse of various scientific theories and specialized terminology, without much cohesion or flow. The articles on Cognition and Problem solving (which is linked to from this article, confusingly, as problem analysis) both do a reasonably good job of presenting the basic information about the concepts they describe from various historical, geographical and disciplinary perspectives. I think this article could benefit from a similar approach. But I think to do so we would have to tear it down to its foundations and reconfigure it.

From its edit history, the article has been under extensive development for years, mostly by well-meaning contributors but without much collaboration. If there are two or three others who would want to undertake a re-write, I think we could improve the article substantially. Any takers? - J-Mo ^{Talk to Me} _{Email Me} 21:49, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

I could be involved in this, but I don't want to do any heavy lifting. I'm the major contributor to Analytic hierarchy process, though my expertise in the field came mostly from hammering out the article. I DO have access to experts in AHP and decision making, and I know pretty much about editing Wikipedia. Additionally, there is an ISAHP conference in Washington, DC, in mid-2014, at which they want to talk about the desirability of AHP concepts getting wider use in the world at large. I don't have any AHP axe to grind, but if I were involved in this project, I could maybe take some insights to the ISAHP folks. Lou Sander (talk) 22:43, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Decision Making in Academia

This comment seems spiteful (or maybe just irreverent). It should be deleted.

Done. (I forgot that I wasn't signed in) Dujang Prang 14:26, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Logical decision making is an important part of all science-based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge in a given area to make informed decisions. For example, medical decision making often involves making a diagnosis and selecting an appropriate treatment. Some[which?] research using naturalistic methods shows, however, that in situations with higher time pressure, higher stakes, or increased ambiguities, experts use intuitive decision making rather than structured approaches, following a recognition primed decision approach to fit a set of indicators into the expert's experience and immediately arrive at a satisfactory course of action without weighing alternatives. Recent robust decision efforts have formally integrated uncertainty into the decision making process. However, decision analysis, recognized and included uncertainties with a structured and rationally justifiable method of decision making since its conception in 1964.

Regarding this paragraph, the source is Gary Klein and his studies in decision making.