Think... and act!

Even an experienced people hope that studying something called "Theory XYZ", everything will be clear and simple to understand. Sorry, but try just to recall your own experience or an experience of close friends — and your hope start not even crashing, but deeply and repeatedly scolded.

Decision theory is one of such nasty surprises. Whoever knows will grunt with understanding, while the rest must try to experience it first themselves. Even philosophers won’t produce so much confusion... Even areas where some specifics exist, mostly are related with advances math (probability theory and statistics in particular, logic starting from classical up to the fuzzy one and other weird things) combined with the theory of algorithms and graph theory.

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But there are several common and unshakable points that often try to circumvent since they couldn’t not be reasoned well, or even simply commented. Here I mean that whatever you do, the significance of the words to make a decision implies that we have at least one option/possibility — it’s the first moment. Secondly, we must assess all options, since even a unique “visible” option actually is a two-option scenario: a) act as indicated or b) any other action, even a trivial inactivity. Hence, we have to evaluate all alternatives, select a necessary one (whatever is called necessary) and act accordingly afterwards, ending up in “new” situation. Thus, we returned to the point one again.

The funny and sad thing happen at the same time — a lot of bone breaking actually is done around the development of options: a) throughout the analysis of stranger’s experience; b) inventing the own ones; c) as for me — it could we even a will of magic or the Force. For a practitioner sometimes there is no difference from where their origin was and what are they actually, since reality starts from evaluation and selection. And mistakes committed here will affect the result of an actual decision sequence.

So, the first real crucial point is the selection of the evaluation criteria in general: in quantity and in possible interrelations (or their absence). Making analogies with since in general and math in particular, we seem to be inside an imaginary decision space of certain dimension (the number of criterions to be used better call a topological dimension). The criteria themselves are essentially are analogues of coordinate axis for some coordinate system. As a result, a process of decision-making (in terms of the action results) transforms into sliding between the points of the imaginary space, providing basis to the notions of location, direction of movement and actual displacement distance. Thus, a sequence of steps during a decision-making (rarely problem is solved in one step) becomes a sequence of vectors in terms of mathematics. Forgetting about an actual direction of movement we obtain a simple broken line — a trajectory inside a discussed decision space.

And if you remember that in practice you only can dream about the accuracy of the assessment/evaluation, a firm “reasonable” or “rational” decision is not guaranteed; hence such trajectory becomes a close analogue of Brownian motion in physics and math.

And from that we can try to “extract” some recommendations about the quantity and the type of criterions to be used.

I’ll keep on writing about these things little-by-little.