To Golf or Not to Golf

My brother-in-law gave me a set of his old golf clubs, some golf balls and tees. My sister took me out to the driving range. She said that I hit the golf too wildly to play on the tight fairways of the golf couse in the park. She wanted to take me to a golf course in town here in Florida. I didn't really want to but she is quite determined.

The next night I had a dream about decision trees. I started thinking about how I could use a decision tree to decide whether I should golf or not.

The first question I asked myself was “What would I like about playing golf?” 

The only thing I could think of was that I would make new friends in the park if I played on Men's day and Canadian's day.

From this, I concluded that if I played golf, it would have to be in the park. So playing on an outside course was of no interest to me.  Therefore, I would need to learn how to control my shots to play on the narrow fairways of the park 's course.

I was stuck with various pros and cons of playing golf in the park. So I decided to do a multi-criteria decision analysis.

I thought of four criteria: Making Friends, Wasting Time, Losing the Ability to Sleep In, the Expense.

Since there were only two options: Play Golf in the Park or Not Play Golf, I only needed to consider the options by the criteria as 0's and 1's.

	Weights	0.50	0.17	0.17	0.17	1
	Options
Criteria		Make Friends	Waste Time	Lost Sleep	Cost	Total
	Play Inside	1	0	0	0	0.50
	Do Not Play	0	1	1	1	0.50

Then I looked at the value of making friends compared to the costs of wasting time, losing sleep and paying fees. I figured that the three costs were equally valued. Then the value of making friends would have to be equal to the value of the sum of the costs for the options to be equally desirable.

Thus, to make playing golf worthwhile, making friends would need to be:

a.  more than three times as valuable as saving time, 

b.  more than three times as valuable as sleeping in, and 

c.  more than three times as valuable as saving money.

I don't know if this helps.

I know I like to sleep in. I have a lot of other things that I would rather spend my time doing than playing golf. Also, golf is very expensive compared to my other hobbies.

So how much would I like to make new friends?