Judging Decisions #
Why? #
Two primary reasons for why it’s important to be able to judge decisions others have made jump out at me. Both help you make your own decisions:
Reason 1: To help you determine if you should make the same decision or not. #
This is fairly straightforward: if someone else has already gone through the work of making a decision, it can be easier to try to judge their decision instead of coming up with your own from scratch. If you deem their decision good, then you can simply make it. Otherwise, you’ll have a starting off point for making your own decision.
Reason 2: To help you determine if the decision maker is to be trusted with other similar decisions. #
A common concrete application is hiring. Interviews are ultimately trying to determine if a candidate will be good at the job, which can be modeled as a bunch of decisions. If the candidate is bad at making the decisions they will need to in their work, then they shouldn’t be hired.
How? #
I think judging decisions is really tricky. The idea I outline here is just that: an idea. I don’t claim that this is better than other methods, or that it’s even useful at all in practice.
One way to judge decisions is by seeing them as a tree of considerations. For example:
- Should I vote for candidate X or Y?
- Which candidate will be better for the economy?
- Which candidate will be better for my local economy?
- Which candidate’s morals align more with my own?
- Which candidate do I think is more honest?
For many decisions, a massively complex tree of possibilities can be built. When these trees are explored by decision makers, most of the exploration is only done in their heads, and only the parts deemed most important are vocalized or written down when presenting the decision.
I propose that one way to judge the quality of a decision is by the decision maker’s ability to express their exploration of this tree. The fewer questions you can ask that are unanswered by the decision maker’s justification, the better.
This approach can be used in technical interviews, or judgment of someone’s work (e.g. when evaluating performance), by asking yourself “How much of the possibility space has this person explored?”.
Categories: Understanding The World