Judgments and decisions are made through an intermediary "lens"
of information which stands between the real world objects and our sense organs. We must form a representation of the environment
in our mind in order to make a judgment or decision. Our judgment or decision is only as good as the representation or reconstruction
of the environment in our mind. It seems that acquiring and formatting the relevant information is key to making good judgments
and decisions.
p.48-49"In psychology, a conceptual framework has been developed
to deal with our judgments and expectations concerning events and outcomes of possible courses of action... The framework,
called the lens model... gets its name from the notion that we cannot make direct contact with the objects and events in the
world outside our sense organs, but only perceive them indirectly through a "lens" of information that mediates between the
external objects and our internal perceptions... The framework forces us to recognize that a complete theory of judgment must
include a representation of the environment in which the behavior occurs. We refer to it as a framework because it is not
a theory that describes the details of the judgment process, but rather it places the parts of the judgment situation in a
conceptual template that is useful by itself and can be subjected to further theoretical analysis."
Can linear models constructed from the relevant parameters
out-predict the opinions of experts? If so, then we have a useful technique for building an evaluation function for a computer
chess program.
p.55"Historically, some of the earliest psychological research on
judgment addressed the question of whether trained experts' predictions were better than statistically derived weighted averages
of the relevant predictors... In 1954, Paul Meehl published a highly influential book in which he reviewed approximately 20
such studies comparing the clinical judgments of people (expert psychologists and psychiatrists in his study) with the linear
statistical model based on only relationships in the empirical data on the events of interest... In all studies, the statistical
method provided more accurate predictions, or the two methods tied."
It appears that people can have a tough time holding several things together in their mind.
p.58,61"Why is it that linear models predict better than clinical experts? ...The psychological
principle that might explain the predictive success of linear models is that people have a great deal of difficulty in attending
to two or more noncomparable aspects of a stimulus at once."
The linear model of relevant parameters does not have to be optimal for it to out-predict the experts.
The magazine Consumer Reports uses linear models to compare the effectiveness of similar products, but each individual category
is based on an expert opinion. Perhaps the true value of an expert lies in a narrowly focused opinion an a relevant parameter,
rather than on an overall combination of factors done without thought to the weighting of the individual factors.
p.63"We believe, however, that a substantial amount of time and
other resources is squandered on expert judgments that could be made more equitably, more efficiently, and more accurately
by the statistical models we humans construct than by we humans alone... Research by one of us (Dawes) shows that it is not
even necessary to use statistically optimal weights in linear models for them to outperform experts."
One idea for an evaluation function is to perform evaluation of winning chances based on a similarity
to positions with known winning chances, such as from an opening book where the outcomes from a commonly played position are
known.
p.114-115"What our minds do seem to work by is a basic sense of similarity... What is representative
judgment? The English empiricists such as John Locke (1632-1704) maintained that thinking consists of the association
of ideas... the basic thesis that thought is primarily an associative process has gained wide acceptance."
