"In July 1838, Charles Darwin, then 29, sat down to make a decision that would alter the course of his life [...] Should he get married?"
Incidentally, Kierkegaard kinda tried to answer this question 5 years later in Either/Or. A couple of related snippets:
"I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both" [0]
And a more long-winded version:
"Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy" [1]
Having said that, my take on that quote is that it seems a bit of a cop out - a way of absolving oneself of the consequences of ones actions.
You may well regret both, but perhaps you will also enjoy one, or you will regret one less, or regret one more, or one has ramifications which due to your (hypothetical) selfish nature you may regret but are better for society, etc etc etc.
Or is it meant to be more of a call to action as opposed to inaction? Make decisions, because you are damned regardless, so at least add your own breath to the winds of fate?
Most of us end up constructing a narrative where whatever choices we made were the right ones, unless they go so disastrously wrong that we can't fool ourselves. So why agonize so much?
The Freakonomics guys did a paper on this. Basically, their conclusion was just do it, make the big change.
Their experiment was based on coin flips and self-reported happiness, but basically those who made the big change after the coin told them to reported being substantially happier, and if you dive into the data, you'll see that those that went with the biggest decisions (quit a job, get married) saw a double digit improvement in happiness.
I've made what seem to be four major career decisions in my life. Aged 14 at school I was in tears because I couldn't do one of the O levels I desperately wanted, the school pretty much forced me onto this new Computer Studies course they'd just started running. As a direct result it grabbed me and I worked in the games industry for a good few years.
In my late 20s a friend offered me a role earning a lot more money wearing a suit in the IT department of an insurance company. A very tough choice as I loved the industry but after a couple of weeks of heart wrenching I took it; absolutely no regrets 25 years later.
Now at work unless I can decide using experience or hard facts I'll either choose not to decide or do a coin toss. It infuriates some people but if I can't sensibly analyse it any more and my crystal ball isn't working that day then random is far better than wasting time thinking about it.
One other thing to help make a quick decision is to toss a coin and whilst it's in the air think how you want it to land and then go with that. The limited time forces you to choose what is generally the route you subconsciously want.
My advice to friends who are chewing on some major decision is always to tell them to flip a coin. It's the perfect way to shut off their brain, which isn't getting them anywhere (or they would have decided already!), and get them to go with their gut. The important thing isn't to go with the result of the flip, but use it to help reveal your preference in a decision you either can't analyze or where the predicted outcomes are more or less equivalent, but different.
> Basically, their conclusion was just do it, make the big change.
Either just do it, or just don't do it. Don't sit on the fence. None of life's decisions (save maybe jumping off a bridge) are anywhere near as irreversible as they seem when we're facing them, no matter what we choose, and the worst thing is to remain paralyzed and let both opportunities pass you by.
Is that really your takeaway from the paper? It depends on what the change is. Look more closely at the sixth column of Table 3 in your linked paper. If the question is "Should I get engaged?" or "Should I have kids?", the facts are in, and the answer is no. You can't just say a blanket statement that all change is to the good.
I know people here aren't big on religion, but just as a perspective (no worse than Jeff Bezos I guess): In Islam there is a certain prayer you are supposed to say before making a big decision. You ask God's guidance for it, that you'll do what's good for you in this life and the next, and so on.
The funny thing is that when you do that, you almost always make up your mind immediately. It's like deep down you already know what the right thing is, and the act of explcitly stating the 'business requirements' (doing the morally right thing, for the long term good) just makes it obvious - no divine intervention needed! I'm pretty sure it's just a clever mental hack, but it does work.
But this is exactly the fallacy described in the article where you only really explore your own biased solution. The article gives an alternative way of exploring more potential solutions instead of going for the one thing that feels right at the moment.
I follow a prayer-like process for some life choices. Heart <> Gut <> Mind (colloquial terms). The article advocates ways for the mind to check the gut. But perhaps the person commenting is saying there's a direct way to get a good answer.
In a state of contemplation for instance, fears and self-centered cravings have less of an influence over decision making. The mind might be great at identifying Kahneman-style cognitive biases (or in the case of the article, imagining failure conditions), but a deep, silent awareness can help inoculate the biggest biases of all: fear & craving.
No, it's not quite. The parent is talking about making the final decision, which is complementary to the process of researching solutions.
But it's still subject to the biases associated with gut feel -- primacy, recency, selectionl; that can be countered with the article's "shut up and calculate".
Just for completeness sake, The Prophet Muhammad(pbuh) did told his companions to discuss the matter with those who have knowledge and expertise in it before performing the prayer and making the decision.
It's funny how these tricks really do work, where you can skip the deliberation and go right to the decision you've already subconsciously made.
Another similar one is to flip a coin and see if you're disappointed in the outcome or not (or alternatively, think about which coin outcome you're hoping for before you look at the result).
There's also another variant of coin-flipping: if you're agonizing over choice between option A and option B, it means that their costs and benefits roughly cancel out - so you're wasting time deliberating, and may as well toss a coin and be done with it.
That sounds a lot like affirming your knowledge of the most likely scenario in your mind. Whereas the article proposes a framework for considering other possibilities which I can imagine being very useful. If there's one thing I regret about decisions I've made in the past it's that I didn't consider enough potential alternatives.
>"The funny thing is that when you do that, you almost always make up your mind immediately."
The one adage I heard that's very similar: Decide to base your decision on a simple coin-flip. Throw it, and cover it so you don't see what side it landed on. You'll know very quickly which option you're hoping to see under that hand.
And if your decision was a failure you accept it as God's will. If you succeed you accept it as God's blessing. It is hard to imagine if there was an actual decision making and postmortem in play.
This is an interesting story, but it's also odd that it doesn't mention any of the standard work on decision making (e.g. Savage), no multiattribute decision making/multiattribute utility theory and all the variations thereof such as lexicographic decision making, nontransitive preferences, generalized additive decomposition, and other nonstandard models of decision making (like e.g. in Fishburn's seminal work or Schmeidler's work).
There is consensus in the decision making literature that the direct scoring method described at the end of the article is flawed for measurement theoretic reasons, and a vast range of elaborate preference elicitation methods have been developed. There is also work in philosophy on value structure that is partly relevant, though not yet at the level of economic modelling.
In a nutshell, the article is interesting but sound decision making is much harder and more complicated than the author portrays it. I just wanted to mention this for people who aren't aware of it, there is a vast literature in this area.
Edit: Although I prefer pseudonymity I've decided to give it up on this opportunity for some shameless self-promotion. If you're working in nontraditional decision making or the ethics of risk, please check out our conference:
Interesting WaitButWhy, but in my opinion, the real big decision is about children, not marriage. The difference of responsibility is light years apart. Marriage can be undone.
Kids and money are the biggest reasons for divorce. Get on the same page about both while you're dating. If someone can't handle an open conversation, they won't make a good partner.
Wow, this is a great site. I was reading the post about careers[1] and it's reflect strongly how I felt when I first came out of college and why I was so miserable (and slightly still am...).
“You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups. And people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration? And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite.
So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this.
Worriers are people who think of all the variables beyond their control, and what might happen.
Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobble. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way, or doing the right thing, and so on and so forth…and lack a certain kind of self-confidence. And if you see you lack self-confidence, you will make mistakes through sheer fumbling. If you do have self-confidence you may get away with doing entirely the wrong thing.
You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh. Because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that is misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you would treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other.
Then through this capacity, you will develop a kind of confidence, and through confidence, you will be able to trust your own intuition. But this is the middle way,
of knowing it has nothing to do with your decision to do this or not, whether you decide you can’t make a mistake
or whether you don’t decide it, it is true anyway, that you are like cloud and water.
And through that realization, without overcompensating in the other direction,
you will come to the point of where you begin to be on good terms with your own being and to be able to trust your own brain.”
I'm currently doing YC Start Up School with a company set out to help solve the problems mentioned in the article and other related ones, for work teams.
Besides making it easy for every invited member to submit and compare alternatives, it allows teams focus discussions by structuring decisions in a visual, clear way (weighted pros & cons, multiple weighted decision criteria, etc.), contrast opinions of different contributors and manage a configurable the process to drive engagement.
I hadn't heard of the concept of "premortems" but the decision structures are flexible so any decision could be configured to support them (either one "premortem" per alternative or one per alternative/participant pair).
If anyone is interested in a demo of Resolutt, please let me know.
I came to conclusion that the smaller the obvious difference between the two options, the less the choice matters.
The actual decision can matter a lot, but if you don't know, then it, unfortunately, depends on luck.
We tend to worry about the future, so we tend to think about decisions by the way they will affect us in the future. But the truth is you can have all four options, including obviously correct decisions that lead to small or no difference in outcome, as well as very unclear decisions that lead to big difference in outcome.
I think you should just focus on the decision itself, make sure you have all the information, and if the two options come very close to each other, just make the call, regardless how big the influence of the decision on your life is going to be.
Readit News
Incidentally, Kierkegaard kinda tried to answer this question 5 years later in Either/Or. A couple of related snippets:
"I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both" [0]
And a more long-winded version:
"Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy" [1]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/28780-i-see-it-all-perfectl...
[1]https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7141047-marry-and-you-will-...
Having said that, my take on that quote is that it seems a bit of a cop out - a way of absolving oneself of the consequences of ones actions.
You may well regret both, but perhaps you will also enjoy one, or you will regret one less, or regret one more, or one has ramifications which due to your (hypothetical) selfish nature you may regret but are better for society, etc etc etc.
Or is it meant to be more of a call to action as opposed to inaction? Make decisions, because you are damned regardless, so at least add your own breath to the winds of fate?
"Adding your own breth to the winds of fate" is adding 0 to 0.
And given your name it could seem that we both share the same origin as Kierkegaard :)
Their experiment was based on coin flips and self-reported happiness, but basically those who made the big change after the coin told them to reported being substantially happier, and if you dive into the data, you'll see that those that went with the biggest decisions (quit a job, get married) saw a double digit improvement in happiness.
Paper is here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22487
I've made what seem to be four major career decisions in my life. Aged 14 at school I was in tears because I couldn't do one of the O levels I desperately wanted, the school pretty much forced me onto this new Computer Studies course they'd just started running. As a direct result it grabbed me and I worked in the games industry for a good few years.
In my late 20s a friend offered me a role earning a lot more money wearing a suit in the IT department of an insurance company. A very tough choice as I loved the industry but after a couple of weeks of heart wrenching I took it; absolutely no regrets 25 years later.
Now at work unless I can decide using experience or hard facts I'll either choose not to decide or do a coin toss. It infuriates some people but if I can't sensibly analyse it any more and my crystal ball isn't working that day then random is far better than wasting time thinking about it.
One other thing to help make a quick decision is to toss a coin and whilst it's in the air think how you want it to land and then go with that. The limited time forces you to choose what is generally the route you subconsciously want.
Either just do it, or just don't do it. Don't sit on the fence. None of life's decisions (save maybe jumping off a bridge) are anywhere near as irreversible as they seem when we're facing them, no matter what we choose, and the worst thing is to remain paralyzed and let both opportunities pass you by.
and making children
The funny thing is that when you do that, you almost always make up your mind immediately. It's like deep down you already know what the right thing is, and the act of explcitly stating the 'business requirements' (doing the morally right thing, for the long term good) just makes it obvious - no divine intervention needed! I'm pretty sure it's just a clever mental hack, but it does work.
In a state of contemplation for instance, fears and self-centered cravings have less of an influence over decision making. The mind might be great at identifying Kahneman-style cognitive biases (or in the case of the article, imagining failure conditions), but a deep, silent awareness can help inoculate the biggest biases of all: fear & craving.
But it's still subject to the biases associated with gut feel -- primacy, recency, selectionl; that can be countered with the article's "shut up and calculate".
Another similar one is to flip a coin and see if you're disappointed in the outcome or not (or alternatively, think about which coin outcome you're hoping for before you look at the result).
The one adage I heard that's very similar: Decide to base your decision on a simple coin-flip. Throw it, and cover it so you don't see what side it landed on. You'll know very quickly which option you're hoping to see under that hand.
There is consensus in the decision making literature that the direct scoring method described at the end of the article is flawed for measurement theoretic reasons, and a vast range of elaborate preference elicitation methods have been developed. There is also work in philosophy on value structure that is partly relevant, though not yet at the level of economic modelling.
In a nutshell, the article is interesting but sound decision making is much harder and more complicated than the author portrays it. I just wanted to mention this for people who aren't aware of it, there is a vast literature in this area.
Edit: Although I prefer pseudonymity I've decided to give it up on this opportunity for some shameless self-promotion. If you're working in nontraditional decision making or the ethics of risk, please check out our conference:
https://sites.google.com/view/lvu18lisbon
We've just recently extended the deadline until 16.9.2018.
[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html
“You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups. And people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration? And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite. So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this.
Worriers are people who think of all the variables beyond their control, and what might happen.
Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobble. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way, or doing the right thing, and so on and so forth…and lack a certain kind of self-confidence. And if you see you lack self-confidence, you will make mistakes through sheer fumbling. If you do have self-confidence you may get away with doing entirely the wrong thing.
You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh. Because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that is misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you would treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other.
Then through this capacity, you will develop a kind of confidence, and through confidence, you will be able to trust your own intuition. But this is the middle way, of knowing it has nothing to do with your decision to do this or not, whether you decide you can’t make a mistake or whether you don’t decide it, it is true anyway, that you are like cloud and water. And through that realization, without overcompensating in the other direction, you will come to the point of where you begin to be on good terms with your own being and to be able to trust your own brain.”
Besides making it easy for every invited member to submit and compare alternatives, it allows teams focus discussions by structuring decisions in a visual, clear way (weighted pros & cons, multiple weighted decision criteria, etc.), contrast opinions of different contributors and manage a configurable the process to drive engagement.
I hadn't heard of the concept of "premortems" but the decision structures are flexible so any decision could be configured to support them (either one "premortem" per alternative or one per alternative/participant pair).
If anyone is interested in a demo of Resolutt, please let me know.
The actual decision can matter a lot, but if you don't know, then it, unfortunately, depends on luck.
We tend to worry about the future, so we tend to think about decisions by the way they will affect us in the future. But the truth is you can have all four options, including obviously correct decisions that lead to small or no difference in outcome, as well as very unclear decisions that lead to big difference in outcome.
I think you should just focus on the decision itself, make sure you have all the information, and if the two options come very close to each other, just make the call, regardless how big the influence of the decision on your life is going to be.