18.6 Magnitude From Multitude


"Why don't we just use cool, clear, faultless reasoning to prove we are right? The answer is that we rarely need to know that anything is aboslutely wrong or right; instead, we only want to choose the best of some alternatives."

Minsky suggests two strategies for such a choice. In strength from magnitude, we look at cooperative or competetive sums of forces (sum of the evidence? In strength from multitude, we count the number of reasons in favour of a decision. For both of these strategies, "strength" is a measure of how likely a decision is to succeed. Question: How are these two strategies related to what we know about people's decision-making heuristics?


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