Biases

I think that the activity we did in class on Monday was yet again another good activity to show the importance of how to properly make decisions. It seemed as if a majority of the class got more questions wrong than right. I got many of these questions wrong myself. When answering the questions I felt as if I thought through them pretty well, although this apparently was not the case. It seemed as if many of these questions could be answered using common sense, but to find the correct answer you had to look deeper than what seemed obvious. For many of the problems I tried to use math to help get the right answer. My approach seemed logical but it was not until review of the questions that, for the most part, without substantial knowledge of statistics some of these questions would prove more difficult than they first seemed. I thought it was interesting that for some of these questions, some of the information within them could lead you astray from the correct answer. What seemed to be important information for decision making was often irrelevant and only led to an incorrect conclusion. This is why it is important to take into consideration all of the biases that we discussed while reviewing these questions. If you are not aware of these biases this could lead to an improper decision. Something that I noticed about these biases is that many of them seemed to be related to things we already know in one way or another. This is why it is important when involved in decision making to take every situation as independent rather than making connection to other situations that may skew your clarity of the situation. This is not to say to not rely on experience and knowledge to assist in decision making but do not be lead astray by fallacies and biases when making decisions.