Is There Still a Role for Judgment in Decision-Making?

In the last several years, a veritable tsunami of advice on how to make decisions has hit the Internet and what few shelves remain in our local bookstores. The advice is a distant relative of early ideas about decision theory in which we were advised to construct decision trees, mapping outcomes, attaching values to each one, and estimating probabilities that various combinations of outcomes might occur. Judgment entered into the construction of the resulting "decision trees," but the process itself was a way of injecting a certain amount of objectivity and analysis into the decision to be made.