I read (or sort of skimmed) your dissertation (since I have a decision to make—actually (too) many) and thought this might provide some useful advice on how to do it.
I was surprised you discouraged people from reading it—maybe you are trying to hide the fun. I found it be one of the most exciting and racy PhD thesis’ i’ve ever read—it could be a best seller. And it just doesn’t read like a pulp novel; like the best novels, it also hits peaks of scientific inspiration which i think rival the visions I’ve been told you get by reading great poets or theological works or einstein or Dirac or hawking in physics—takes you to a transcendent place.
In any event while i enjoyed the read, i didn’t get my problem solved—i.e. advice on what decision to make. (I ’might even have to decide first which of my problems i should try to solve first, and then do a 2nd iteration of the method and try to solve that particular problem. Or, the method might suggest I try to solve all the problems at once—eg if your house is burning down in a fire you both put it out and rebuild it at the same time.)
Since i found the procedure not exactly intuitive, it seemed to suggest you have to weigh off the cost of a ‘search procedure’ to get information about the possible value of alternative decisions, combined with the cost of making a decision. (eg for a burning house, you might spend some costly time consulting with some firefighters and homebuilders about the best course of action.)
A simple example might be shopping for an item. You could just go to a place you know—and you know the cost, and also the quality or value of the item. Or you could spend alot of time and money shopping around, to see if you can find something with a better value/cost ratio. There is always the risk that you may just waste alot of time and money and find nothing better.
I was wondering if the example above is the sort of decision making problem you are talking about.
(I think my main problem is finding a job—but I don’t really know where to look, and if there are any of the kind I want (I might be looking for something that does not exist) , and whether and how to research finding one. The cheapest default option might be just to wait and see if one comes to me, though it may lead to same result----nothing. One problem is I don’t know what the ‘prior’ is—any more than did the people from europe who explored the USA knew what they would find. They could try to get information from the indigneous people, but that takes time and effort,, and they didn’t know how reliable it would be.)
Seriously—start with the 5 pages I recommended, and that should give you enough information (VoI FTW!) to decide if you want to read Chapters 1 & 2 as well.
(But Chapters 3 and 4 really *are* irrelevant unless you happen to be designing a biosurveillance system or a terrorism threat early warning detection system that uses classified information.)
I read (or sort of skimmed) your dissertation (since I have a decision to make—actually (too) many) and thought this might provide some useful advice on how to do it.
I was surprised you discouraged people from reading it—maybe you are trying to hide the fun. I found it be one of the most exciting and racy PhD thesis’ i’ve ever read—it could be a best seller.
And it just doesn’t read like a pulp novel; like the best novels, it also hits peaks of scientific inspiration which i think rival the visions I’ve been told you get by reading great poets or theological works or einstein or Dirac or hawking in physics—takes you to a transcendent place.
In any event while i enjoyed the read, i didn’t get my problem solved—i.e. advice on what decision to make. (I ’might even have to decide first which of my problems i should try to solve first, and then do a 2nd iteration of the method and try to solve that particular problem. Or, the method might suggest I try to solve all the problems at once—eg if your house is burning down in a fire you both put it out and rebuild it at the same time.)
Since i found the procedure not exactly intuitive, it seemed to suggest you have to weigh off the cost of a ‘search procedure’ to get information about the possible value of alternative decisions, combined with the cost of making a decision. (eg for a burning house, you might spend some costly time consulting with some firefighters and homebuilders about the best course of action.)
A simple example might be shopping for an item. You could just go to a place you know—and you know the cost, and also the quality or value of the item. Or you could spend alot of time and money shopping around, to see if you can find something with a better value/cost ratio. There is always the risk that you may just waste alot of time and money and find nothing better.
I was wondering if the example above is the sort of decision making problem you are talking about.
(I think my main problem is finding a job—but I don’t really know where to look, and if there are any of the kind I want (I might be looking for something that does not exist) , and whether and how to research finding one. The cheapest default option might be just to wait and see if one comes to me, though it may lead to same result----nothing. One problem is I don’t know what the ‘prior’ is—any more than did the people from europe who explored the USA knew what they would find. They could try to get information from the indigneous people, but that takes time and effort,, and they didn’t know how reliable it would be.)
David might be cheating, using a neg: saying so much “don’t read my dissertation” that now I am actually very curious about it.
Seriously—start with the 5 pages I recommended, and that should give you enough information (VoI FTW!) to decide if you want to read Chapters 1 & 2 as well.
(But Chapters 3 and 4 really *are* irrelevant unless you happen to be designing a biosurveillance system or a terrorism threat early warning detection system that uses classified information.)
Sorry, man, you’re just making it sound even cooler.
OK, in retrospect, it definitely turns out that designing good biosurveillance systems was more important than I implied 2 years ago.