Adonis Diaries

What do you feel about genetically modified produce? Affect heuristic and slave to emotions

Best to consider the pros and cons separately on critical issues.

List the possible benefits, their importance and get their respective probabilities that these advantages will occur.

If the probability of a benefit is very low (in the tails of the distributions), take the benefit out of the list. Why?

Since you lack the necessary information on this rare event, you don’t need to complicate your decision process. Especially that this event is not related to serious health consequences.

In the cons lists, you need to consider the rare event probabilities linked to serious health consequences.

How much harm to health and how serious is the harm in the long term should take priorities in any assessment.

The expected values is the product of the probabilities by the amount of benefits or disadvantages.

Though why it must be a simple multiplication and addition is a contentious concept for me in decision theory.

Actually, when it comes to personal issues, not many mathematicians and decision makers take the trouble of evaluating any decision based on expected values.

The automatic, one-dimensional impulse in any event prevent us from taking the trouble of listing the advantages and risks.

It is our emotional reactions, initial spontaneous behaviors, to issues that determine our assessments.

If we feel we like something then we diminish the probability of risks.

Though in reality risks and benefits are Not dependent and should not be treated as such in our evaluations.

Tweaking facts to fit our “likes” lists is one of the deleterious effects on our decisions.

Smiling faces, a shining sun, an attractive appearance, a lovely encounter… all change our disposition during the daily decision making, even in the stock market performance.

Against our best intentions, we are ready to substitute “What do I think” with “How do I feel about this“.

And our future depend on our emotional reactions.