Learning for Deciding

As we learn, our decisions become better. Smarter people make better decisions. Right?

There's actually an argument to be made that learning is in service of decision-making. We want to work with people and live with people who make good decisions. Good decisions make the world better:)

Most of my writing tends to focus on learning because my job title is "Teacher", but if I'm honest, I care a lot more about decision-making, than simply making people wiser. Let's jam.

AI is all the rage these days, and I don't want to jump on a bandwagon just because it's a hot topic, but it's worth taking a second to talk about how machines "learn" and how machines "make decisions." They're a bit simpler than we are, and, unlike us, can fully split their decision-making capability from their learning prowess.

I'm not sure if everyone knows this, but Neural Networks (the "brains" of AI) are not learning when we're leveraging them to drive our cars, write our term papers, or play the perfect song for our morning commute. During those times, they are only making decisions. They take some input, pass it through some deeply composite (complex) function, generate some output, and then stand at the ready for the next input. We geeks call it "inference".

They learn at other times. "Training" is where computer scientists intentionally feed these networks huge amounts of data and let them play a flashcard-like guess and adjust game, where they become less and less wrong about the decision they would make if they were in infer mode.

We determine the quality of these networks on the quality of their decision-making.

People can't help but learn. We're always learning. I'm learning as I'm typing this. Learning as I'm taking breaks to do a few dishes or talk to a friend. But, I think it's important to note that learning is made valuable through its impact on the quality of our decisions.

At the risk of seeming like I'm just splitting hairs and showing off that I know some fun facts about AI, I think this is important to note because of the following:

• Many smart people hesitate to make decisions, I find this tragic
• Many teachable moments should be replaced by decision-coaching
• Knowing this enables nonprofessional teachers to be more effective in guiding their "students". Consider including how you've used new knowledge to make decisions when sharing how you learned some new thing. Storytelling about lessons applied in decisions tend to be stickier and more useful.

That's it for this week. I'm going to decide to press publish and get back to work. Let me know if at any point you need help deciding. ??