How The Wise Decide

Smart Choices

A friend of ours made an interesting comment the other day about How the Wise Decide.  He liked the book, but wanted to learn more.  Specifically, he was interested in whether decisions have basic structures that everyone adheres to.  It turns out they do.  And the best place to learn it is by reading a book called Smart Choices.  Howard Raiffa is one of the co-authors and is regarded by many as the godfather of decision analysis.

The Brain is Like a Muscle

Scientific American ran a very interesting article about the capacity of the brain to make decisions.  The author, On Amir, postulates that the brain has a limited amount of bandwidth to make decisions.  If you spend considerable time on one decision, even mundane type decisions, you may actually exhaust your brain and hinder making other decisions.  For instance, all that time spent debating with co-workers where to go for lunch, and then what to order once there, may in fact severely detract from your ability to make tough decisions once you get back to the office.  He’s a link so you can read the whole article.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making

Lawrence Summers returns to D.C.

Lawrence Summers, one of the 21 wise in How the Wise Decide, is going back to Washington.  He was the Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and now will be the lead economic advisor inside the White House for President-elect Obama.