Making decisions based on your personal beliefs and values is not always bad. Sometimes the decisions made according to your personal beliefs can be better than the decisions made if you were neutral. — QuirkyZen
What are beliefs and whether ones beliefs are correct or not is a different topic — QuirkyZen
What metric are you using here to assess how "good" a decision is? — Echarmion
You seem to be using "belief" to refer to (moral? religious?) value judgements. But obviously some value judgements are always required when making any decision, so you must be referring to some specific kind of belief? — Echarmion
Your question is too general. A lot depends on what decision you are making and which beliefs are influencing it. A decision has to be guided by some beliefs, otherwise it would just be random, and that can't even be called a decision. — SophistiCat
there are some people who have managed to keep their beliefs at side and make decisions while being completely neutral. — QuirkyZen
For example, work from my laboratory has shown that emotion is integral to the processes of reasoning and decision making, for worse and for better. This may sound a bit counterintuitive, at first, but there is evidence to support it. The findings come from the study of several individuals who were entirely rational in the way they ran their lives up to the time when, as a result of neurological damage in specific sites of their brains, they lost a certain class of emotions and, in a momentous parallel development, lost their ability to make rational decisions. Those individuals can still use the instruments of their rationality and can still call up the knowledge of the world around them. Their ability to tackle the logic of a problem remains intact. Nonetheless, many of their personal and social decisions are ir- rational, more often disadvantageous to their selves and to others than not. I have suggested that the delicate mechanism of reasoning is no longer affected, nonconsciously and on occasion even consciously, by signals hailing from the neural machinery that underlies emotion. — Antonio Damasio - The Feeling of What Happens.
those decisions to be better than the ones made neutrally there is one condition. You have to have correct beliefs. What are beliefs and whether ones beliefs are correct or not is a different topic but the thing is that making decisions according to your beliefs is not as bad as we often tend to think about it. — QuirkyZen
I don't understand. Can you give me an example of a decision that can be made without values and beliefs? We have discussions here on the forum ad nauseum about what constitutes knowledge. What is knowledge other than beliefs about the state of affairs in the world - something you believe to be true? — T Clark
I am not saying that a decision can be made without beliefs and values but I'm saying that it can be made without personal beliefs and values (though I have mentioned in comments on this discussion that it is impossible to make a decision without influence of personal beliefs but we can make the influence very low). — QuirkyZen
Well there is no metric for measuring if a belief is correct or not and that is the reason why being neutral while making a decision is important because only 1 belief or a few beliefs regarding a certain topic can be correct and most beliefs are wrong and that's why mathematically being neutral and making decisions without showing baisenes towards your own beliefs is the best option in most of the cases — QuirkyZen
Again, I can't think of an example of a decision that can be made without values — T Clark
How is "being neutral" not a belief? Is it not a belief of yours that it is better to be neutral in making decisions? — Moliere
I think there might be a misunderstanding between us because you are saying that a decision cant be made without value and in my last reply I told you that I also believe that decision can't be made without beliefs and values but I also believe that decision can be made without personal beliefs and values(though not 100%) — QuirkyZen
even if I try not be influenced by personal beliefs that itself is a belief — QuirkyZen
It will really help if you can give us an example of a decision that you or anyone has made without input from personal values and beliefs. — T Clark
That is the reason that making decisions while being neutral is often considered best because one's chances of having correct beliefs or a lot closed than his chances of having wrong beliefs. So, the impact of personal beliefs in decision making can be good or bad it just depends on your beliefs — QuirkyZen
A simple example of this is a judge in a courtroom given a decision. There he is not influenced by his personal beliefs and values but rather gets beliefs from external sources. — QuirkyZen
A simple example of this is a judge in a courtroom given a decision. There he is not influenced by his personal beliefs and values but rather gets beliefs from external sources. — QuirkyZen
No threats, but circumstances, such as: you have to work otherwise you will end up on the streets or no food on table is such an example of a forced decision, on the other extreme slavery was a forced decision too or a custodial sentence handed by a judge to a defendant a decision with which the defendant has no choice but to accept. — kindred
In the first example, forcing someone to make a decision doesn't force them to make a neutral one — T Clark
For most of the people personal values and beliefs have a lot of influence in their decisions but there are some people who have managed to keep their beliefs at side and make decisions while being completely neutral. — QuirkyZen
Now that you talk about it like that I think you are right and no decision can be neutral and every decision is influenced by personal beliefs — QuirkyZen
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