At the end of a paper titled "The Futility of Decision Making Research", in which Weiss and Shanteau reflect on the uselessness of their research careers, the authors take a side-swipe at the Naturalistic Decision Making research community.
Which, what? sciencedirect.com/science/articl
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I like to joke that scientists are interested in what is 'true' and practitioners are interested in what is 'useful', but, man, this takes it to the extreme.
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I think a more accurate summary of my disgust is that Shanteau/Weiss are being very unkind.
If NDM is focused on usable, pragmatic outcomes, you should evaluate it on that. You shouldn’t say “oh, it’s not science”.
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It's pragmatic to a fault, because the organisations that fund them (the military, industry, etc) want results (from decision tools that work), not theories that produce decision tools that don't work.
My problem with Shanteau and Weiss's dismissal is that it's so ... harsh.
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To be fair, Shanteau/Weiss are great researchers themselves.
And the very fact that they wrote this paper reflects well on them. So there's that.
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After laying out how traditional JDM research has been useless they criticize that NDM rejects said research 🤷♂️
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I mean everyone shits on Kahnemann and co. about many results not replicating, but is there a similar effort to test and replicate RPDM etc.? One frustration I have with that field (but maybe just haven't read enough) is that the answer to "how to make better decisions"...
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seems to boil down to "become more of an expert" i.e. develop expert intuition by going to realistic sims. Which...fine, okay. But how does an expert evaluate whether he's making the right calls?
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That's pretty funny. This works, but it's not a "theory", so let's stick with the ridiculous for now, eh?
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They really need to go work on their carnap vs popper approaches to making new science...
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