Thinking

For once amazon suggested a book that was not just another book by the author of the book I was buying (yeah, amazon's suggestions are better than I give them credit for, but still fall way short of my expectations). Anyway, I tried it out and ended up with The Thinker's Toolkit by Morgan D. Jones. Normally I would be more skeptical of a book trying to teach problem solving, but the author is a former CIA analyst so I was more inclined to give him a chance. The book does have some useful techniques in it, but the author annoyed me by going on about how none of the techniques are taught in school since I had learned most of them in school.

The overall message from the book is that your mind has its own ways of solving a problem which are not necessarily the best when trying to rationally analyze a problem, especially if trying to do so without bias and that you can help the process by properly structuring the problem. Take the time to write down the problem and information and spend the time to do a good job presenting the information and then logical analysis will flow more easily.

The rest of the book is fourteen ways of structuring a problem. Mostly just tables (which he calls matrices, but he really means tables), time lines, decision and probability trees and various ways of looking at utility and expected utility. There are also a few others.

Many of the techniques I had learned in engineering and economics classes (having taken game theory I had trouble paying attention to the chapter about making tables of expected utilities - well at least two of you know what I'm talking about), but I did learn that these same techniques are used by people analyzing world events - in many of the examples he took newspaper articles and looked deeper into the issue and used the techniques to structure the information.

Overall Debugging wins - and I did not bother using Morgan Jones's 9 step method for creating a weighted ranking to make that determination.