The greatest challenge we face in dealing with the complexity of our world? To think again and to think better. In a world that challenges us with ever more complicated problems, the quality of our thinking is a critical game-changer. As individuals, organisations, societies, and cultures, we need to cultivate thinking that is both insightful and farsighted. We must learn how to mobilise and apply intelligence that goes beyond the ordinary - one that continuously exceeds its own limits. The Postgraduate School of Thinking, at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels (VUB), is an experimental program with the mission of challenging us all to achieve just that. Deploying an innovative combination of mobilisation methods, the program sets out to define the cognitive strategies, practices, and habits that are the marks of exceptional thinkers. This book features a variety of interdisciplinary research articles and discussions that invite us to explore our capacity for extraordinary thinking.

"Pullman offers his readers essential insights into how humans reason and make decisions. Both concise and far-reaching, his work teaches us how to challenge intuitive logic and examine the processes for deliberative reasoning. This text will prove foundational for students in their intellectual journey toward the development of real skills in critical thinking. By pointing to simple yet profound examples, Pullman's text is both readable and provocative as it challenges us to consider the very mechanisms by which we understand our own cognitive biases." --Bradley A. Hammer, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

What is it that makes some of us better - or worse - than others at committing to a choice? What are the forces that hold us back, and how can we successfully overcome them?Every facet of our lives depends on the decisions we make. Yet, how often do we pause to reflect on our ability to make the best and smartest choices? The key is how we confront and refine thedecision making process.Joseph Bikart explores the intricacies of decision making, challenging us to understand why we make the choices we do. He explores how the true power of decisions, especially the toughest among them, help us to face our fears and may in turn change how we think aboutourselves.The book is broken into four clear parts and punctuated with short practical essays Bikart presents a lively and compelling exploration of the process of decision making covering;Indecision, indecision - what makes us indecisive? What holds us back and why? Where Art Thou? How and where we get stuck and the importance of relaxing one's grip. The Momentum of Decisiveness - Keeping our focus and proactivity. The Deciding Mind - making our smartest choices. Drawing from such different fields as philosophy, psychology, neurology, literature, art historyand theology, we are taken on a journey from the depths of procrastination to the elation of decision making. Presenting a fresh perspective on what to do at the proverbial fork in the road, Bikart's unique philosophy is insightful, thought provoking, and potentially life-changing.

This book presents the concept of the double hierarchy linguistic term set and its extensions, which can deal with dynamic and complex decision-making problems. With the rapid development of science and technology and the acceleration of information updating, the complexity of decision-making problems has become increasingly obvious. This book provides a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the latest research in the field, including measurement methods, consistency methods, group consensus and large-scale group consensus decision-making methods, as well as their practical applications. Intended for engineers, technicians, and researchers in the fields of computer linguistics, operations research, information science, management science and engineering, it also serves as a textbook for postgraduate and senior undergraduate university students.

Info-metrics is a framework for modeling, reasoning, and drawing inferences under conditions of noisy and insufficient information. It is an interdisciplinary framework situated at the intersection of information theory, statistical inference, and decision-making under uncertainty. In Advances in Info-Metrics, Min Chen, J. Michael Dunn, Amos Golan, and Aman Ullah bring together a group of thirty experts to expand the study of info-metrics across the sciences and demonstrate how to solve problems using this interdisciplinary framework. Building on the theoretical underpinnings of info-metrics, the volume sheds new light on statistical inference, information, and general problem solving. The book explores the basis of information-theoretic inference and its mathematical and philosophical foundations. It emphasizes the interrelationship between information and inference and includes explanations of model building, theory creation, estimation, prediction, and decision making. Each of the nineteen chapters provides the necessary tools for using the info-metrics framework to solve a problem. The collection covers recent developments in the field, as well as many new cross-disciplinary case studies and examples. Designed to be accessible for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners across disciplines, this book provides a clear, hands-on experience for readers interested in solving problems when presented with incomplete and imperfect information.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Group Decision and Negotiation, GDN 2021, which was planned to be held in Toronto, ON, Canada, during June 6-10, 2021. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The field of Group Decision and Negotiation focuses on decision processes with at least two participants and a common goal but conflicting individual goals. Research areas of Group Decision and Negotiation include electronic negotiations, experiments, the role of emotions in group decision and negotiations, preference elicitation and decision support for group decisions and negotiations, and conflict resolution principles. The 12 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 74 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: pandemic responses; preference modeling for group decision and negotiation; conflict resolution; and collaborative decision making processes.

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the ranking methods for interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets, multi-criteria decision-making methods with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets, and group decision-making methods with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations. Including numerous application examples and illustrations with tables and figures and presenting the authors' latest research developments, it is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals in the fields of fuzzy mathematics, operations research, information science, management science and decision analysis.

An agent often does not have precise probabilities or utilities to guide resolution of a decision problem. I advance a principle of rationality for making decisions in such cases. To begin, I represent the doxastic and conative state of an agent with a set of pairs of a probability assignment and a utility assignment. Then I support a decision principle that allows any act that maximizes expected utility according to some pair of assignments in the set. Assuming that computation of an option's expected utility uses comprehensive possible outcomes that include the option's risk, no consideration supports a stricter requirement.

This book is about improving human decision making and performance in complex, dynamic tasks. The defining characteristics of a dynamic decision task are that there are a number of decisions required, that decisions are interdependent and that the environment in which the decision is made is transient and feedback is pervasive. Examples of dynamic tasks include the sustainable management of renewable resources and how businesses might allocate resources for research and development (R&D) projects. Decision making in dynamic tasks can be improved through training with system dynamics-based interactive learning environments (ILE's) that include systematic debriefing. Some key features of the book include its didactic approach, numerous tables, figures, and the multidimensional evaluative model. Researchers can use the developed "evaluation model" to gauge various decision-aiding technologies. How to Improve Human Performance in Dynamic Tasks appeals to those interested in the design and evaluation of simulation-based decision support systems, as well as policy makers, students, researchers, and industrialists concerned by the issue of improving human performance in organizational tasks.

Recent legal developments challenge how valid the concept of mental capacity is in determining whether individuals with impairments can make decisions about their care and treatment. Kong defends a concept of mental capacity but argues that such assessments must consider how relationships and dialogue can enable or disable the decision-making abilities of these individuals. This is thoroughly investigated using an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophy and legal analysis of the law in England and Wales, the European Court of Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. By exploring key concepts underlying mental capacity, the investigation concludes that both primary relationships and capacity assessments themselves must display key competencies to ensure that autonomy skills are promoted and encouraged. This ultimately provides scope for justifiable interventions into disabling relationships and articulates the dialogical practices that help better situate, interpret, and understand the choices and actions of individuals with impairments.

Eine Ausbildung zum Beruf ist meist die Grundvoraussetzung fur eine erfolgreiche Berufsbiografie. Fur Jugendliche werden jedoch auch oft Ausbildungsangebote geschaffen, die sich zwar an Berufskriterien orientieren, jedoch nicht immer zu gesellschaftlich anerkannten Berufsabschlussen fuhren. Unter anderem werden zeitlich verkurzte Formen der Berufsausbildung entwickelt, um bestimmten Zielgruppen den Berufseinstieg zu erleichtern oder Beschaftigungsfelder mit geringeren Qualifikationsanforderungen zu erschliessen. Der Band stellt empirische Untersuchungen und theoretische Diskussionen aus Deutschland, OEsterreich und der Schweiz zu verkurzten Berufsausbildungen vor, um Wirkungen und Effekte der Konzeptionen zu erschliessen und zu bewerten. Die Buchbeitrage gehen insbesondere der Frage nach, welche Formen der Berufsausbildung als Ausbildung zum Beruf angesehen werden koennen.

Classical decision theory evaluates entire worlds, specified so as to include everything a decision-maker cares about. Thus applying decision theory requires performing computations far beyond an ordinary decision-maker's ability. In this book Paul Weirich explains how individuals can simplify and streamline their choices. He shows how different 'parts' of options (intrinsic, temporal, spatiotemporal, causal) are separable, so that we can know what difference one part makes to the value of an option, regardless of what happens in the other parts. He suggests that the primary value of options is found in basic intrinsic attitudes towards outcomes: desires, aversions, or indifferences. And using these two facts he argues that we need only compare small parts of the options we face in order to make a rational decision. This important book will interest readers in decision theory, economics, and the behavioral sciences.

Recent legal developments challenge how valid the concept of mental capacity is in determining whether individuals with impairments can make decisions about their care and treatment. Kong defends a concept of mental capacity but argues that such assessments must consider how relationships and dialogue can enable or disable the decision-making abilities of these individuals. This is thoroughly investigated using an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophy and legal analysis of the law in England and Wales, the European Court of Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. By exploring key concepts underlying mental capacity, the investigation concludes that both primary relationships and capacity assessments themselves must display key competencies to ensure that autonomy skills are promoted and encouraged. This ultimately provides scope for justifiable interventions into disabling relationships and articulates the dialogical practices that help better situate, interpret, and understand the choices and actions of individuals with impairments.

Over the last 25 years, evolutionary game theory has grown with theoretical contributions from the disciplines of mathematics, economics, computer science and biology. It is now ripe for applications. In this book, Daniel Friedman--an economist trained in mathematics--and Barry Sinervo--a biologist trained in mathematics--offer the first unified account of evolutionary game theory aimed at applied researchers. They show how to use a single set of tools to build useful models for three different worlds: the natural world studied by biologists; the social world studied by anthropologists, economists, political scientists and others; and the virtual world built by computer scientists and engineers. The first six chapters offer an accessible introduction to core concepts of evolutionary game theory. These include fitness, replicator dynamics, sexual dynamics, memes and genes, single and multiple population games, Nash equilibrium and evolutionarily stable states, noisy best response and other adaptive processes, the Price equation, and cellular automata. The material connects evolutionary game theory with classic population genetic models, and also with classical game theory. Notably, these chapters also show how to estimate payoff and choice parameters from the data. The last eight chapters present exemplary game theory applications. These include a new coevolutionary predator-prey learning model extending rock-paper-scissors; models that use human subject laboratory data to estimate learning dynamics; new approaches to plastic strategies and life cycle strategies, including estimates for male elephant seals; a comparison of machine learning techniques for preserving diversity to those seen in the natural world; analyses of congestion in traffic networks (either internet or highways) and the "price of anarchy "; environmental and trade policy analysis based on evolutionary games; the evolution of cooperation; and speciation. As an aid for instruction, a web site provides downloadable computational tools written in the R programming language, Matlab, Mathematica and Excel.

Die Autoren prasentieren die Resultate einer prozessbegleitenden Evaluation eines Qualitatsverfahrens, das auf der Wahrnehmung konkreter Unterrichtssituationen, deren professioneller Auswertung und intensiver padagogischer Zusammenarbeit in Kleingruppen beruht. Neben der gesteigerten Selbstreflexion und einer Verbesserung des eigenen Unterrichts erlebten die Lehrer eine deutliche Verbesserung ihrer kollegialen Beziehungen und ihrer Zusammenarbeit. Als starkendes Element wurde das vertrauensvolle und wertschatzende padagogische Gesprach zur Unterstutzung konkreter Unterrichtssituationen erfahren. Erreicht wurde dieser Erfolg durch ein Verfahren, das mit der Unterstutzung externer Lehrer auf die Selbstqualifizierung eines Kollegiums angelegt ist.