Doing the Right Thing – The Worcester Journal

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by Warren Singh

Decision time, and the fate of the free world hangs in the balance: it’s 1939, and I’ve been put in charge of a new top-secret government project called The Manhattan Project, devoted to developing a game-changing weapon in competition with the Nazis. Given the circumstances, it’s a little nerve-wracking to consider the first thing that I have to do, which is choose a second-in-command to lead the team of physicists that will be the heart and soul of the endeavor.

I’m on page 18 of The Right Decision, an immensely fun read, despite being written like a textbook (which, being published by McGraw Hill, is probably intentional) regarding how to make decisions.

Written by a math professor named James Stein, the book draws from the fields of mathematics and economics (more specifically, decision and game theory) to address better ways of weighing and choosing options. Its chapters are divided into various broad topics: the first part of the book covers an idea central to decision theory, the ‘payoff factor’. Really, it’s a fancy way of saying, ‘what is it that you want out of this?’ Subsequent chapters deal with various ways of assessing the core idea, such as the inadmissibility option (if an option is inferior to other, similar ones, drop it like it’s on fire) or the Bayes criterion (which choice works out best on average?).

Midway, the book takes a pleasantly diverting turn, the reasons for which Stein explains at the beginning. He writes that one doesn’t learn to ride a bike solely by reading about it: you instead take a few core ideas, and then go and practice them until it clicks. Then you vary the situation and do it again. This is what he aims to do with the book, and this is where the fun is. Interspersed through the chapters are problems presented for the reader, in which Stein presents a real or hypothetical scenario and asks what you, the reader, would do. Spanning such diverse scenarios as “my best friend and his girl are having trouble and have broken up, when can I make a move for her” to “in what direction should you take your multinational corporation at this critical juncture,” these problems are immensely entertaining.

The author writes that he hopes that doing these puzzles will be just as entertaining as crosswords or Sudoku, but with the added benefit of helping us make decisions. Stein offers 28 scenarios, complete with solutions. He advises tackling one a day for a month, with the hope that at the end of it, the reader will have vastly improved decision-making skills.

Stein argues that we are the sum of our decisions, his point being that our decisions won’t always lead to good things, as the real world frequently has factors that we can’t influence, but over the long haul good decisions tend to add up better than bad ones.

It reminded me of a championship poker player, who wrote that poker is a discrete game: that is, all the odds are known. If all the odds are known by everyone at the table, then what separates champions from the merely adequate? Well, as he explains, even though the probabilities in poker are well defined, it is possible to make the correct play (there’s always a correct play, given that the probabilities are limited) and lose. A champion player is someone who can make the right play five times in a row, lose five times in a row, and the sixth time, still make the correct play.

The Right Decision doesn’t pretend to deal a winning hand, much less guarantee a good payoff. But it does teach one how to assess the odds, which is oddly liberating. In the end, there are no guarantees, and all we can do is play a beautiful game.

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Warren Singh is a bookworm and wiseacre who sometimes goes undercover as a writer. He also occasionally pretends to be studying chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass. Sinecures, paeans, and disproportionately massive bribes may be proffered at probablystillsomewhatincorrect.wordpress.com