Do you really follow this? It seems like someone following these rules would rarely be wrong, but that they'd be paralyzed by the cost of making decisions.
all decisions in the US are driven by dollars, and the guidelines are usually made by those that have a lot of dollars. so they create circular situations to benefit themselves.
Not really. Sometimes you know the cost right now will be less than a few hours. The future cost of the same changes will be at least that, with a very high liklihood (sometimes, a near certainty) of being 2-10x that.
Are you really arguing that this rule of thumb leads to optimal decisions 100% of the time?
Because that is clearly untrue. If you want to make the argument that allowing exceptions to the rule opens up a pandora's box that is ultimately worse than just always following the rule blindly, okay. I think I'd still disagree, but it's at least a defensible argument.
Heh, many people have a "plethora of experience making important decisions under intense pressure". The question is, were most (or any) of these decisions correct?
Except some of those won't be. We're taking life or death decisions here. (Or at least productive years of life.)
There is always a cost and this cost did come to bite you sooner or later.
The highest standard for decision making is definitely not "going with your gut". I wonder if anyone is actually claiming this or you just like to build strawmen.
Typical reasons to adopt a practice is politics and marketing, then legacy, only then followed by effectiveness...
I'm surprised to see no mention of decision paralysis. Hanging over every decision is a meta decision of how much effort to spend in making it (and so on, recursively). Given all the unpredictability the author points out, many decisions don't get much more benefit from much more thought.
If you interpret it from a different angle, it would be much clearer.
1. Those made the decisions are smart, really really smart people. If they were dumb, there is no way they can get to where they are now. So if the decisions look questionable, they probably are indeed questionable. But that does not mean they made a mistake. Smart people don't do obvious stupid moves, if they do, there must be some reasons we don't know.
2. If the budget is not used, at best it lapses or worse will be used by someone else. So do whatever they can if they have nothing better to do with it.
3. If you do something for someone-else with someone-else's money, neither the price nor the quality would be much of your concern.
4. After handling meat, you know, there is oil on your hands.
Correct, it doesn't really guide you here. It just tells you that you don't need to be certain of the outcome before acting due to the potential extreme costs of inaction.
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