> Elementary topology shows that a good decision-making process is equivalent to managing by metric.<p>I have not checked the proof, but I think what the author means by "equivalent" is that it comes up with the same result, without regards to computational complexity, much less human and organizational psychology.<p>I would not expect the computational and informational costs to be the same for both. Shifting the order of computation may not matter, functionally speaking, but can affect efficiency in many cases. For example, some decisions are easier to make if you can defer gathering detailed information until later in the process: for example, you can prune low-scoring alternatives cheaply at the beginning.<p>Humans also often need to dig into a problem in order to explore the parameter space. This is roughly analogous to "knowing it when you see it."