Decisions, decisions, decisions

In The Dilbert Blog: Making Decisions, Scott Adams almost endorses Obama. What I found interesting, though, was the explanation of his thought process.

I’m fascinated by how people make decisions when faced with lots of unknowns, such as when they pick a presidential candidate to support.

The usual method, as far as I can tell, is to pick what you think is the most important of the unknowns, take your best guess about it, and base your entire decision on that one factor. For example, you might say, “That candidate would be better at boosting the economy.” But you don’t really know. Even the experts don’t know.

The “guessing about unknowns” approach makes sense if you can reliable assign odds to the unknown. In reality, that’s rarely the case. So I take a different approach. I make my decision entirely on the elements I know for sure.

He goes on to list what he knows about the war in Iraq and comes to the conclusion that, given his limited knowledge, he is in favor of an early pull-out. He then lists all of the things he “knows” about the candidates (though I say some of them are opinion and not necessarily knowable fact) and certainly seems to have more positive things to say about Obama than the rest of them.

As for myself, all I know right now is that I don’t know enough to reach a conclusion yet. I’ll make my “statement” vote for Ron Paul next month and begin the real work of choosing a horse once the rest of the country narrows it down to two.