Thinking Whole: Applied Decisional Sciences

Moneyball

Having already mentioned Michael Lewis – In 2003, Lewis wrote a 2-million copy seller entitled Moneyball; which was made into a popular and star-studded movie starring Brad Pitt in 2011. Moneyball described how Billy Beane (who has been credited with pioneering sports analytics) and Paul DePodesta (the real “Peter Brand” of the movie). DePodesta graduated Harvard with a degree in economics in 1995. It is highly plausible and possible that he would have been there exposed to the work of Tversky and Kahneman on Prospect Theory.

It was only after Moneyball, the book, became as popular as it did that Lewis came to learn how many of the ideas presented in his book had actually been generated decades earlier by Kahneman and Tversky. And so it came to pass that a theory that had developed to help Israel make the most of its human military assets, on the basis of how they made and could make decisions, has become one of the cornerstones of sports analysis for major teams in both baseball and American football. Talk about applied decisional sciences at work!

As a kind of “contrition” for not knowing about Tversky and Kahneman’s contributions to behavioral economics, Lewis researched and wrote what ultimately became The Undoing Project.  The book not only gave credit where it was due, it also demonstrated how two geniuses, at diametrically opposite poles of personality, were able to collaborate on something that would likely not have been created by either on their own. The story of their collaboration demonstrates how the best thinking can be taken to genius level through a fine balance of collaboration, challenge, and even positive conflict.

Blinking Thinking

“The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.” Lao Tzu

In his 2005 book blink; The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell (who also authored The Tipping Point, Outliers, and other successful books) introduces the concept of “thin slice” thinking. Most of us would recognize the concept by its other, more common, name – intuition.

The three premises of thin slice thinking are:

1. We do most of our thinking intuitively and intuitive thinking appears to be neither demonstrably better nor worse than long, drawn-out, painstaking, deliberative thinking.
2. Intuitive thinking is not as “snap” or “blink” as it first presents. This is mainly because we can make good decisions quickly, with little information, mainly because of a lifetime of experience that comes before, and is in some way relevant to, so therefore informs, this decision.
3. The biggest downside to thin slice thinking is prejudice. Some belief to which we subscribe can influence, even flaw, a decision; and perhaps entirely invalidate it.

Gladwell is not a psychologist, nor a scientist. He is a journalist who writes on the wide range of topics. Which is likely why he relies so heavily on “for instances” and case studies.

The idea that we can simply “know” some things has been the subject of a great deal of argumentation. So has the idea that our experiences inform our decisions. In ancient Greece, there were two schools of thought. To make the explanation blink-consistent. One school believed that we recognize a table because we have experienced enough tables so that we can use our “table-ness experience” to perceive the essence of table within each new table ex experience. The other school believed that we recognize a table because our minds somehow connect to a universal “form” of the perfect table.