Decision-making vs Ideology-following.

[elfs]

Mordin Solus

The video game Mass Effect 2 introduced one of my all-time favorite characters in video games: the Salarian scientist Mordin Solus. Mordin is your tech research character; once you have him, your character can salvage alien tech and he will, with time and resources, buff your character and team.

When it comes to how we treat projects, encounters, campaigns, or any other event with a definitive ending, there are two kinds of people: decision-oriented people and outcome-oriented people.

Outcome-oriented people are focused on the end result of any project such as raising a child, a major initiative at work, a date with a prospective partner, or a low-stakes round of poker. No matter how hard they worked at something, if the outcome isn't to their liking then they did something wrong.

Desicion-oriented people, on the other hand, know they're working with insufficient information when they begin. Nonetheless, their inclination is to gather as much information as possible and make the best decision in a probability-oriented way. If the outcome isn't to their liking, they don't get upset by it, because they know they did the best they could.

Mordin is the quintessential decision-oriented person; when asked whether or not he regrets the outcome of his many career choices over his lifetime, his response is: "Of course not. Made the best decision at the time with the information available. Outcome unfortunate, but did the best we could."

I realized today that there are two different kinds of decision-orientation, and one is functional, and the other is not. Every project has a desired outcome, the question is whether or not the outcome is the one you want. Mordin's decision-orientation is flexible; if the result is not the desired outcome, he allows himself to change his tactics, adopt new desired outcomes based on the actual outcome obtained, and work to achieve his ends.

There's another decision-orientation, though, that's dysfunctional: the one where a project doesn't have the desired outcome, so those running the project double down on the decisions they've made. They're not working with the best possible information, or making the best decisions they could toward the desired goal.

Unfortunately, these people currently rule the United States.

Abstinence-only education is a classic example. The goal is to reduce teen pregnancy and sexual experimentation. The decision is to not teach kids about sex, except to make it terrifying. Every time this has been tried, it has failed, and sorting through the "pro vs. con" articles, you'll find ideological decision-based thinking everywhere: it should work, abstinent teenagers should manage themselves.

Of course, the desired outcome may not actually be to reduce teen pregnancy; it may be to create an environment where sexually active teenagers are deliberately put at higher risk for disease, pregnancy, and the accompanying stigma and poverty as "life lessons" to the self-satisfied, thus perpetuating the dichtomy between those who obey the decision-makers, and those who didn't.

Any place where decision-oriented people are looking to reduce harm, you'll find people with ideological decision-oriented language. They use the same vocabulary, but they have covert agendas. Their goals are not yours.

Comments

[omahas]

"Of course, the desired outcome may not actually be to reduce teen pregnancy..."

If course it isn't. The desired outcome isn't even to "obey the decision-makers". The goal is to punish those who value self-satisfaction over following God's Laws.

As for the rest of the article, I think that dysfunctional decision-orientation is the basis for Portal and Portal 2.