Decision Theory Quotes

It is the theory that decides what can be observed. ~ Albert Einstein

Human individuals and human organizations typically have preferences over resources that are not well represented by an "unbounded aggregative utility function". A human will typically not wager all her capital for a fifty-fifty chance of doubling it. A state will typically not risk losing all its territory for a ten percent chance of a tenfold expansion. [T]he same need not hold for AIs. An AI might therefore be more likely to pursue a risky course of action that has some chance of giving it control of the world. ~ Nick Bostrom

Interactive Decision Theory would perhaps be a more descriptive name for the discipline usually called Game Theory. ~ Robert Aumann

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise. ~ Brennan Manning

Economists are people who wonder if what works in reality can also work in theory. ~ Ronald Reagan

Power relations between men and women must change profoundly, men must be partners in the pursuit of gender equality, in their decision-making roles, as heads of state, CEOs, religious and cultural leaders, and as partners and parents. ~ Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

Caution is an important quality in a leader, but it has to be caution followed by decision. Caution followed by ambivalence can be a weakness. ~ Leon Panetta

Attachment parenting is this theory that if you wear your baby around and you sleep with your baby and you breast-feed for a long time, the baby will be more attached to you. ~ Sarah Ruhl

It was a distortion, a mercenary decision to create this parallel history in order to drive the movie for an American audience, Both my grandparents were officers in World War Two, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achieve. ~ David Ayer

That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart. ~ Richard Peck

Liberalism does not preclude an organisation of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good for the payment of debts. ~ Jean Francois Lyotard

I'd lived in LA for two years and I said to my agent that I wouldn't do any more network TV, because my family and I had just made the decision to live in England. It would be a whole year in LA shooting network TV. ~ Damian Lewis

Secretary of the treasury Albert Gallatin is accused of treason by war enthusiasts merely for suggesting budget adjustments to pay for war measures. ~ Donald R. Hickey

I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory. ~ James Gleick

Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics: in the political class struggle. ~ Louis Althusser

I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious. ~ Philip Kitcher

Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system. ~ Milton Friedman

Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building. ~ Arthur Erickson

The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth. Workers have no say over decisions affecting them. If workers sat on the board of directors of democratically operated self-managed enterprises, they wouldn't vote for the wildly unequal distribution of profits to benefit a few and for cutbacks for the many. ~ Richard D. Wolff

Maybe I wanted children, maybe I didn't, but I wanted the decision to be a choice, not a mandate. Last time I checked, childlessness was only supposed to be a condition of career advancement for nuns. ~ Peggy Orenstein

Once you make a decision, you can never go back and change it. Sometimes, farther down the line, you have a chance to alter its effects. But the original decision is there forever. ~ Timothy Zahn

It is a mistake to reduce every decision about Christian living to a "Heaven-or-Hell issue."
For example, some ask if the Bible specifically says a certain action is a "sin" or will send them to "Hell." If not, they feel free to indulge in that action unreservedly and ignore any scriptural principles involved. But this approach is legalistic, which means living by rules or basing salvation on works. It treats the Bible as a law book, focusing on the letter and looking for loopholes.
By contrast, the Bible tells us that we are saved by grace through faith, not by our works (Ephesians 2:8-9). Grace teaches us how to live righteously, and faith leads us into obedience. (See Titus 2:11-12; Romans1:5; Hebrews 11:7-8.) ~ David K. Bernard

Simon received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his contribution to organizational decision making: It is impossible to have perfect and complete information at any given time to make a decision. ~ Timothy Ferriss

There was so much pressure by myself and everyone else and I can't handle this by myself. It's not good for me so I made the decision never go to a ski coach for mental help. I said last season I will try a mental coach and see how it works. ~ Michaela Dorfmeister

At the same time, if we were feeling a knot of guilt about our decision re: dying, it might have been because we regretted our failure to achieve a certain kind of wisdom born from certain kinds of life experiences...Our skittishness when it came to any crisis, the preference we had for deflecting important conversations with jokes, rather than facing them head-on. It was fine, we agreed, not to want to grow old. Fine, too, to take steps to ensure we didn't grow old. But we'd also avoided growing up. We'd lived our lives like perpetual children, hiding in corners, never knowing what to say, never knowing what to do. If our plan to die was problematic, it was problematic in that it eliminated the possibility of our ever becoming serious, capable women. ~ Judith Claire Mitchell

As bothered as I am by having to defend my decision, I'm more incensed that people think they have the right to ask. ~ Danielle Henderson

How many leaders in the Islamic world are really familiar with the ideas which underpin modernity? I have met some leaders of activist factions, and have been consistently shocked by their lack of knowledge. How many can even name the principal intellectual systems of our time? Structuralism, post-modernism, realism, analytic philosophy, critical theory, and all the rest are closed books to them. Instead they burble on about the 'International Zionist Masonic Conspiracy', or 'Baha'ism', or the 'New Crusader Invasion', or similar phantasms. If we want to understand why so many Islamic movements fail, we should perhaps begin by acknowledging that their leaders simply do not have the intellectual grasp of the modern world which is the precondition for successfully overcoming the obstacles to Islamic governance. A Muslim activist who does not understand the ideologies of modernism can hardly hope to overcome them.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

She hadn't realised how low her self esteem had been, first during her relationship, when she tried to turn herself into someone else, and then when recovering from the break up.
Because however much she was a part of the decision to break up, she still felt bruised and battered, never thought she'd have the energy to go through all this again with someone new.
It has been so much easier, since they separated, to be cocooned with her family, to nest in her cosy home and allow life to carry on for others, outside the safety of her house. ~ Jane Green

Thirty-two years after the legalization of abortion by the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, the majority of Americans consider themselves pro-life. ~ Rick Santorum

That all species are related in the flow of life and death is a keystone of evolutionary theory. The grandeur displayed in this view of life is ecological in character. ~ Elizabeth A. Johnson

This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories nature presents to us is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion. ~ W. R. Thompson

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers. ~ Edgar Fiedler

Sought a world philosophy-or an integral philosophy-that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world's great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details-that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world really is one, undivided, whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos, a plausible Theory of Everything. ~ Ken Wilber

Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions. ~ Barney Frank

I've made a decision and now I must face the consequences. ~ J. Michael Straczynski

Where tradition tells us that people are best kept under control and denied freedom of expression and action, humanistic psychology argues for liberation, more open decision-making and a sharing of power and control. ~ Keith Tudor

I'm by no means an expert at giving advice on depression, but I would say that a lot of my show is about making the decision to be happy. We all think that happiness is something that just falls into our lap. But it's something you have to really work on. ~ Lilly Singh

There are so many great stories and characters out there that you can just keep saying, "Yes," but you've got to eventually make the decision that if it's something you really want then do it for yourself. ~ Channing Tatum

At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions. ~ John Rawls

Say your boss has been taking longer than usual to respond to your e-mails. Many people would take that as a sign that their star is falling because if your star is falling, the chances are high that your boss will respond to your e-mails more slowly than before. But your boss might be slower in responding because she is unusually busy or her mother is ill. And so the chances that your star is falling if she is taking longer to respond are much lower than the chances that your boss will respond more slowly if your star is falling. The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs. The effect on the probability that an event will occur if or given that other events occur is what Bayes's theory is all about. To ~ Leonard Mlodinow

Scientists are educated from a very early time and a very early age to believe that the greater scientist is the scientist who makes discoveries or theories that apply to the greatest ambit of things in the world. And if you've only made a very good theory about snails, or a very good theory about some planets but not about the universe as a whole, or about all the history of humankind, then you have in some sense accepted a lower position in the hierarchy of the fame of science as it's taught to you as a young student. ~ Richard Lewontin

Astronomers have been bewildered by the theory of an expanding universe, but there is no less expansion in the moral infinite of the universe of man. As far as the frontiers of science are pushed back, over the extended arc of these frontiers one will hear the poet's hounds on the chase. ~ Saint-John Perse

We are living in a society that is totally dependent on science and high technology, and yet most of us are effectively alienated and excluded from its workings, from the values of science, the methods of science, and the language of science. A good place to start would be for as many of us as possible to begin to understand the decision-making and the basis for those decisions, and to act independently and not be manipulated into thinking one thing or another, but to learn how to think. That's what science does. ~ Ann Druyan

I began my career performing in plays and musicals in New York, but by the mid-'80s, opportunities in Hollywood beckoned and I made the move to Los Angeles. It was a good decision. Work took off, but most important, I met my family out there - my husband, Bill, and the children we would adopt: Elijah, Mae-Mae, and Aron. ~ Christine Ebersole

Sometimes knowing what's right isn't a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all. ~ Jodi Picoult

In order to sell a product or a service, a company must establish a relationship with the consumer. It must build trust and rapport. It must understand the customer's needs, and it must provide a product that delivers the promised benefits. ~ Jay Conrad Levinson

Discussion. Just know that one answer over the other does not equal a solution. It's only a decision. And decisions have ramifications ~ David Baldacci