Zeleny, Milan;
Multiple criteria decision making
McGraw-Hill, 1982, 563 pages
ISBN 0070727953, 9780070727953
topics: | optimization | math | multi-criteria | pareto
The people who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the spiritual middle classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their compromising insignificance. How petty their dreams must have been! The man who pursues the mere attainable should be sentenced to get it -- and keep it. Let him rest on his laurels and enthrone him in a Morris chair, in which laurels and hero may wither together. Only through the unattainable does man achieve a hope worth living and dying for -- and so attain himself. He with the spiritual guerdon of a hope in hopelessness, is nearest to the stars and the rainbow's foot. - Eugene O'Neill, playwright, NY Tribune, Feb 1921 Singleness of purpose in areas other than religion is fanaticism. - H.E. Daly, 1981 Things can only be correctly evaluated by comparing them with the most valuable. . . The heart of man does not tolerate an absence of the excellent and supreme. - Jose Ortega y Gasset, Revoln of the Masses, 1964.
Tversky and Kahneman (1975): People were randomly placed in two groups and assigned a number between 0 1nd 100 by the spin of a wheel made in their presence. They were told to assume this number was an initial estimate of the percentage of African nations in the UN. Their task was to adjust this figure to reflect their own estimates of the correct percentage. . . . the roulette wheel values turned out to have a marked effect. The group wirh a roulette value of 10 percent estimated the African membership to be 25 percent, whereas the group starting from 65% estimated it at 45 percent. . . . similarly, the 5-second estimate of the product 1x2x3...8 is much less than 8x7x...1 - the median values are 512 and 2,250 (correct answer = 40,320).