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Voodoo decision-making

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This page is open for visitors but is still under construction.

The usual Disclaimer

The objective of this page is not to teach you, dear reader, what “Voodoo decision-making” is all about. Rather, this page provide you with a rather broad description of the term, and links to easily accessible material that you can use to study this subject on your own. This page is just a general preface to the conversations I have had with ChatGPT and Bart about this interesting subject.

You don’t have to be an expert on decision theory to understand and appreciate the issues I discuss with ChatGPT and Bart on this subject.

What is Voodoo decision-making?

According to the Merriam-webster online dictionary,

And according to the Encarta online Encyclopedia (does not exist anymore)

Voodoo n

  1. A religion practiced throughout Caribbean countries, especially Haiti, that is a combination of Roman Catholic rituals and animistic beliefs of Dahomean enslaved laborers, involving magic communication with ancestors.

  2. Somebody who practices voodoo.

  3. A charm, spell, or fetish regarded by those who practice voodoo as having magical powers.

  4. A belief, theory, or method that lacks sufficient evidence or proof.

To the best of my knowledge, the term “Voodoo Decision Theory” was coined by Brian Skyrms (1996, p. 51)

The behavior of Kropotkin’s cooperators is something like that of decision makers using the Jeffrey expected utility model in the Max and Moritz situation. Are ground squirrels and vampires using voodoo decision theory?

Sniedovich (2012) discuss this concept in the article entitled “Black swans, new Nostradamuses, voodoo decision theories and the science of decision-making in the face of severe uncertainty”.

So, in our discussions, a “Voodoo decision theory” is a decision theory that is problematic in the sense that it is based on implausible assumptions, or is self-contradictory, or is extremely unrealistic, etc.

To illustrate, in this discussion a “voodoo decision theory” could be a decision theory that is based on the idea that under severe uncertainty it is not necessary to consider possible events that are not in the immediate neighborhood of a rough, poor, unreliable estimate of the uncertain event to be realized.

We examine such an example in our discussion on Info-Gap Decision Theory.

I had very interesting discussions with ChatGPT and Bard on this subject. Here are their perspectives. First, Bard’s



And here is ChatGPT’s:



Bibliography

  • Skyrms, B (1996) Evolution of the Social Contract. Cambridge University Press.
  • Sniedovich, M.(2012) Black swans, new Nostradamuses, voodoo decision theories and the science of decision-making in the face of severe uncertainty. International Transactions in Operations Research, 19(1-2):253-281.

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