I consider myself good at making important decisions. The irony in this is that I'm actually pretty lousy at making small decisions. Important decisions usually have some amount of data or information associated with them that allows for comparison. When you are making the comparison you can give weight or credence to one aspect over another. A system of analysis can be put into place that ranks the data on importance and pertinence leading you to eliminate some choices and promote others as you ultimately make a final decision.
Small decisions on the other hand are problematic. I can almost never make up my mind (for example) on which restaurant I ought to eat at without resorting to something like a coin toss. (By the way, if you grab what you think is a penny it behooves you to verify that it actually has a 'heads' and a 'tails' otherwise, as it turns out, you haven't made any real progress). I think this is because everything is weighted fairly equally in small decisions where bigger decisions actually have parts with some weight behind them. Equally weighted 'big' decisions are the stuff moral dilemmas are made up of.
From a clinical standpoint I realized that I have no significant objection to 'cookbook' medicine as the use of algorithms and decision systems is sometimes called. I think the competent, confident clinician can use their clinical judgement and be guided rather than threatened by the additional support provided by these systems. It was however, a bit of a wakeup call for me reading about Heuristics and Biases because I tend to be a very intuitive person when I have to make rapid decisions and according to our reading the majority of individuals don't actually 'get it right' when they rely on these decision makine shortcuts; makes me want to brush up on my formal logic and be a little more careful in my critical thinking. This is not to say that all decsions should only be made in a logical fashion, but when it comes to important snap decisions I could probably be a little more prepared.
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There you go again Jeremy, I must say I enjoy reading your blog because as I said before you take it to another level. Now on the idea of small decisions and them being weighted fairly equally, I am not so sure about that. First I would have to challenge you on what you term as small decisions and large decisions. You state that large decisions usually have some amount of data to them, hummmm! not sure about that either. I would argue that whether a decision is termed as large or small depends on the consequences or rather outcomes that may arise. Great comments!
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