ABSTRACT
Applied Decision Theory (ADT) is becoming widely used in business, government and medicine, where the stakes are high enough to justify the trouble of doing it right. Its practical impact in private decision-making is quite limited, but practice doing quantified ADT can enhance students informal rationality and intuition, for example in the form of verbal guidelines. Most of the contribution ADT can make is usually achieved with half a dozen very spare and structurally simple modeling tools. The risk of mis-modeling is great and can lead to errors much worse than students unaided intuition might. The major flaw in much ADT practice, responsible for many results that fail to outperform students unaided judgment, is that the decision models do not take into account much valuable knowledge that students have access to and already use implicitly in students regular thinking.
