Back-justifying your decision-making.

Excerpt from Dirk Gently

“You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally towards the right decision. The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want.'

'Well, Gordon's great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program's task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion.

“The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon... I've recently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and if you know what you're looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear.”

see related: (2014-08-14) Alexander Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor, Systemantics, Data-Informed Product Management; not-thinking tool