New York University Stern School of Business
Conflict & Decision Making
Summer 1999 Professor Seth Freeman
Class 5 - Using Critical Thinking to See a Problem from Different Viewpoints

 "Many things are true, but how do they fit in?"

I. Introduction- Weighing Competing Arguments about a Hard Decision

A. The Parking Lot Case- What if We Ignore Competing Arguments?
B. The Bay of Pigs Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis
C. But if I Consider Competing Arguments, Won't I be Paralyzed into Indecision?
D. A Seemingly Paradoxical Idea- to Overcome Indecision, Don't Rush to Decision

II. Why Learn About Law in an Economics Course

A. To Synthesize a Wise, Creative Solution, First Consider Competing Arguments
B. To Wisely Consider Competing Arguments, Think Critically
C. To Learn to Think Critically, Learn How Lawyers Think
D.Law and Regulation as one Way to Manage Complexity)
E. Critical Thinking in a Nutshell- testing the validity of an idea against other truths

III. How Does a Lawyer Argue a Case?

A. Stare Decisis and the use of precedent

1. Cases with similar facts, issues should have similar outcomes
2. Promotes uniformity, stability, fairness
3. Binding and persuasive authority

a. the hierarchy of courts
b. sister courts

4. Distinguishing unhelpful cases ('unsimilar')
5. Analogizing to helpful cases ('similar')
6. Brainard and Douglas cases
7. Subway Pull Case
8. Synthesizing a solution to the Subway Pull Case

B. Key Tools in Critical Thinking

1. Testing a proposition against a standard of truth
2. Asking what words mean
3. Marshalling arguments- asking for reasons why the idea is valid
4. Considering counterarguments- seeking reasons why criticisms may be right, wrong
5. Drawing distinctions
6. Considering what if...
7. Synthesizing

V. Application

A. Practice asking about the Pros and Cons and demand Counter arguments
B. Use the debate to help reveal ways to synthesize conflicting views, if possible

What is the Difference Between 'Options' and 'Alternatives'?

During the I FORESAW IT training, you may have wondered: what exactly is the difference between Options and Alternatives? Here's a brief explanation.

When you work through the mnemonic, part of your task is to brainstorms as many possible solutions to the problem as possible. These solutions are Options. The goal here is to broaden thinking creatively, looking beyond the obvious. Anything that might satisfy an Interest you've identified is fair game here. It's precisely because most Options are not very good that we need to generate as many as possible. For example, when you decided to attend NYU, it was one of several Options you had. Others included going to another MBA program, going full time, going to cooking school, going to writing school, law school, divinity school, joining the peace corp., apprenticing with a great business person, or staying where you were and working full time instead so you can advance more rapidly in your workplace.

Once you've done this, it's time to weed out the bad ones by asking which will clearly not satisfy the interests here. Usually this is easy, at least initially. Eventually you wind up with one or two or a handful of Options that are worth seriously considering. In our example, to oversimplify terribly, let's say your sole interest is to make as much money in the LR as you can. You quickly eliminated the idea of going to another program. Now what? Other letters of the mnemonic can help you refine and edit these ideas further- for example, you may discover that one of the Options creates an Ethical dilemma. For example, it may be that going to school full time will violate a promise you made to your employer; another fails when assessed using Independent Criteria; for example, it may be that career counselors and headhunters tell you that working for a certain business mentor will have be of appreciable value to you in the job market. Let's imagine that only three ideas survive in some form after you've worked through most of the mnemonic.

Alternatives simply means that you should consider each of the Options by comparing it to what you might do instead. Each Option, is, of course, an Alternative in its own right, so in this sense there is some overlap between the terms. But Alternatives means going a bit further and examining to full value of each choice (including the choice of doing nothing). It means consciously asking: 'what will I gain from each of these choices? How well will each satisfy my interests?' It means seeing each choice as costing the other choices you forgo. In short, when you think about Alternatives, you simply weigh each Option against what you might do instead. In so doing, you are deliberately thinking about your Opportunity Costs.

For example, If you were thinking of attending NYU to make more money, your best alternative may have been to continue to work full time instead, invest the money you would've spent on tuition in the market, and work hard to get a promotion early on. Would this have satisfied your interest(s) better than NYU? If so, the alternative was superior- or, to use economic jargon, the Opportunity Cost of NYU was too high to justify attending.

But don't we do this implicitly whenever we have a set of choices? Yes and no. Many students decide whether to go to NYU by simply asking 'can I afford the tuition, and will the degree increase my earning power?' But even assuming money is the only consideration, focusing solely on tuition and future salary is a bad idea, because it ignores the value of other choices. The true cost (that is, the Opportunity Cost) of an NYU education is usually the value of working full time and advancing faster, and the return you might have had investing the tuition in a good five year investment. Alternatives is in the mnemonic to help you explicitly think about such things.

Right now the US is trying to decide whether to launch a satellite- called Trinia- that would put a camera one million miles above the earth. The Trinia satellite would send back a real time TV picture of the whole earth, which would be posted continually on the Internet. The dollar cost is about $50 million. NASA is considering nine variations on this idea. Each of these nine ideas is an Option. There are other Options too, including spending the money on something else altogether- like breast cancer research, say, or cutting the Federal budget by this amount. The true cost of the Trinia satellite then is not $50 million but the best alternative to it. Is the work this satellite will do worth, say, a slightly better chance of curing breast cancer? That is the question Alternatives forces us to consider. * * *