What do people do about that? They multiply by weighting factors that get results they think are reasonable. But that isn’t actually a way of making decisions. They’re using their intuition, common sense or something else. That is how the decision is actually being made and that pre-existing conclusion is biasing their decision making process.
I’m not sure about “But that isn’t actually a way of making decisions.”
I think that the big quote is making these points:
(note: these are not in the same order as the quote, also the list isn’t meant to be exclusive)
- there’s a common decision making process
- which is based on ppl’s intuition / common sense
- that method is implicit is is what they actually use (and also biases the process)
- a similar explicit method is to pick weighting factors that makes seemingly-sensible answers come out
- the explicit method is basically what the common method is doing, but people don’t actually use the explicit method (they use the implicit one)
“But that isn’t actually a way of making decisions.” is literally saying that the subject (that: the explicit method) isn’t a decision making method. But I think it’s intention is to say: the explicit method isn’t what is actually done by ppl most of the time. I’m not sure tho – like I think that explicit-weighting-factors is a method (well, once you add a way to like rank or pick a winner). Isn’t Analytic hierarchy process an example of that?