Soft intelligence for hard decisions

An approach to decision making based on soft metrics could allow problems to be solved where no definitive “yes-no” answer is possible in fields as diverse as healthcare, defense, economics, engineering, public utilities and science. Writing in the International Journal of Intelligent Defence Support Systems Mihaela Quirk of Los Alamos National Laboratory explains how.

Progress in science and technology demands logical correctness, but problems with a definitive “yes” or “no” answer are rare. Decision makers are often faced with vast quantities of information, whether epidemiological statistics on the incidence of disease, data on failure tolerances in a fleet of passenger aircraft, or conflict decisions in the defense arena.

How can the need for logical rigor be reconciled in the face of such fuzzy information? The answer may lie in the burgeoning field of soft metrics in which shades of gray and judgments that adopt a “lesser of two evils” stance can be applied to provide a justifiable answer that is not necessarily yes or no.

“Modern decision making challenges the human capacity to reason in an environment of uncertainty, imprecision, and incompleteness of information,” Quirk explains. Moreover, information and attention are in one sense inversely proportional – the more information the less attention can be given to each “atom” of information.

Physorg