This article discusses philosophical influence, especially the influence made by Confucianism and Daoism, on the way Asian people see and understand the world. Recently, Richard Nisbett drew a connection between Chinese philosophy (Confucianism and Daoism) and the cognitive profiles of the people who live in Asian countries where Confucianism and Daoism are strong social and cultural traditions. He argues that there is a peculiar way that Asians think and perceive things and this cognitive pattern is influenced by a group of (...) principles derived from Chinese philosophy. This article critically analyzes Nisbett’s explanation, his emphasis on the principle of change in particular, and provides an alternative explanation of the connection between Chinese philosophy and cognitive peculiarities of Asians. Asians combine and integrate opposite viewpoints not because they believe that things change in all unexpected directions, but because they see the world as a big system with interrelated and mutually influencing components. (shrink)

Decision makers often rely on expert opinion when making forecasts under uncertainty. In doing so, they confront two methodological challenges: the elicitation problem, which requires them to extract meaningful information from experts; and the aggregation problem, which requires them to combine expert opinion by resolving disagreements. Linear averaging is a justifiably popular method for addressing aggregation, but its robust simplicity makes two requirements on elicitation. First, each expert must offer probabilistically coherent forecasts; second, each expert must respond to all our (...) queries. In practice, human judges (even experts) may be incoherent, and may prefer to assess only the subset of events about which they are comfortable offering an opinion. In this paper, a new methodology is developed for combining expert assessment of chance. The method retains the conceptual and computational simplicity of linear averaging, but generalizes the standard approach by relaxing the requirements on expert elicitation. The method also enjoys provable performance guarantees, and in experiments with real-world forecasting data is shown to offer both computational efficiency and competitive forecasting gains as compared to rival aggregation methods. This paper is relevant to the practice of decision analysis, for it enables an elicitation methodology in which judges have freedom to choose the events they assess. (shrink)

The search for knowledge has continued to expand to new domains since its start in the seventeenth century. Some of them have proved unusually resistant. Methods have had to proliferate to deal with the obstacles, for example in the social domain. There also have been ideological reactions. Surprisingly frequently, methods and activities that appear to be effective in dealing with such domains are classified as "preliminary" or are distinguished by a "point of view" that has yet to be transcended to (...) achieve "true" knowledge. One such activity is the acquisition of high quality experience. It is argued in the paper that it does not deserve being treated as a poor relative. It has a history of its own and can point to many successes, for example in the development of new values and emotions. Its only drawback seems to be that the search for high quality experiences has tended to be heuristic, or if one wishes, artistic. This situation is changing, however. In the paper the differences between the acquisition of knowledge and that of high quality experience are delineated. It is argued that facilitation of the latter's searches requires the development of interactions between entities that generate and structure experiences--i.e., of human collectives that stabilise sufficiently to execute a collective action in their environment. They are characterised by the use of coordinating languages. (shrink)