John Krubski and Alexandra K. Camus, Psy.D.
The Best Thinking about Thinking has occurred between 2002 and 2019. People have been thinking about thinking for centuries, if not millennia. For some reason, there has been something of an explosion of thinking about thinking between 2002 and 2019. What might The Israeli Defense Forces, The Nobel Prize Committee, The Oakland A’s, the Blinking Man, the 5-minded man, fast think/slow think, and whole think have in common?
They have all played a part in that explosion. They have all contributed to the birth of what we are taking the liberty of calling Applied Decisional Sciences. They have, each and, all pushed our thinking about thinking beyond the cutting edge.
About Applied Decisional Sciences
We believe that Thinking Whole, and the concept of Thinking Whole that spawned it, are playing a small part in that expansion of understanding; particularly when it comes to actionability. We believe our contribution adds the prescriptive dimension to this conversation.
Most books and studies about human decisioning and group dynamics tend to be lightly researched theories and forensics in the form of case studies. For the most part, they are descriptive in nature. In this essay, we propose to offer a brief multi-disciplinary summary of the best of these, followed by an introduction to what we intend to be a more prescriptive approach.
The terminology and the concept of “applied decisional sciences” is something we believe necessary to describe the next frontier of thinking. Most of you have likely heard the phrase “decision science;” which, according to Harvard University is:
Decision Science is the collection of quantitative techniques used to inform decision-making at the individual and population levels. It includes decision analysis, risk analysis, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis, constrained optimization, simulation modeling, and behavioral decision theory, as well as parts of operations research, microeconomics, statistical inference, management control, cognitive and social psychology, and computer science.
While most fields of research focus on producing new knowledge, decision science is uniquely concerned with making optimal choices based on available information. Decision science seeks to make plain the scientific issues and value judgments underlying these decisions, and to identify trade-offs that might accompany any particular action or inaction.”
The language and the concepts of decision science could apply as readily to machine “thinking” as it might to human thinking; and equally applicable to computer brains and human brains.
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