Decisions

We all make decisions all the time.  They vary from the insignificant to the vital, and from the easy to the difficult.

On the scale of significance the only thing I really wish to say is that I believe that human beings essentially have a (largely) fixed scale of significance.  That is that the most important things you ever deal with feel as significant as the most important thing that a subsistence farmer in Africa encounters.  Suddenly put yourself in the shoes of a subsistence farmer and then all of your previous worries will suddenly seem insignificant, but until that happens the hot water tank leak seems horrendous.  Mostly things don't matter as much as we think they do.

On the scale of difficulty I think there is an interesting effect whereby decisions become easier at each end of a perceived scale of difficulty.  I'll try and explain. 

The simplest decisions have very few components (a rock, a head and an arm for bashing one with the other) and very few outcomes (head bashing or no head bashing) and a substantial difference between the outcomes (ouch! or not.)  It is a very simple decision as to whether to hit yourself in the head with a rock.

The most complicated decisions have very many components (career advancement, personal satisfaction, a good view, how friends and family feel about it, will I ever see Paris?) and usually these components are conglomerates of other, simpler components.  More complicated decisions will also have smaller differences in outcomes so that each individual component may be enough to swing the balance from one side to the other.

Generally we conflate the complication of a decision with the difficulty of making the decision, but I think that is a mistake at the highest levels of complexity.  What I think is that at a certain point a decision becomes complicated enough that the outcome of our decisions is so unpredictable that it passes beyond an" event horizon" in that we simply cannot make a rational judgment on a decision.  There is a reason why in science there if the concept of "statistically significant" and that is that below a certain threshold you cannot make any reasonable judgments.

You are going to have a party in late May in a week's time.  You could have a barbecue outside in the lovely spring air, or a cosy event inside.  If the weather is nice then an outside event would be much nicer, if the weather is awful then inside would be much nicer.  Do you plan for the event to be inside or outside?  The thing is that you simply don't have the information necessary to make the right decision, you cannot predict the weather reliably a week in advance.  Sometimes you just have to guess, and guessing is easy.

So, let us take a very complicated decision that I think is actually easy to make.  Let us say you are an 18 year old about to go off to college.  You can go to an expensive school with a good reputation and study economics, which you have never studied before, or go to an easier, more relaxed school and study psychology for the first time.  As an 18 year old, who has never lived away from home or studied any of these subjects, the choice is extremely complex and the consequences seem to be large.  This seems like a difficult decision.  However, the amount of information available to predict the outcomes of either choice is so low compared to the difference between the decisions that tossing a coin and going with the result is a completely rational way to proceed.

When I decided to leave Michigan for Oregon there is not one chance that I could have predicted meeting someone who asked me to play music in a band, or that a girlfriend would dump me at a convenient time for me to fall in love with my wife.  I left Michigan because I had few ties there (and I had fewer in Oregon) and I was sick of the weather.  I hadn't even thought of what turned out to be extremely important consequences of a decision made for entirely different purposes.

People don't like this.  People don't like unpredictability, or the idea that a vast amount of our experiences just happen to us.  Humans like to understand, plan, and control their lives.  When the situation is complicated and unpredictable we want to simplify and predict.  The cognitive dissonance between the reality of a situation beyond our understanding or prediction, and our view as the controllers of our own fate is what I think makes big decisions so painful.

When a decision seems really hard to make the truth is that at the point where you can make a decision which choice you make doesn't matter, that is that you cannot make a bad decision.  This may seem weird, after all the wrong decision can have all sorts of terrible consequences, but that's not my point.  Someone asks you to guess which way up a tossed coin will land.  Guess right and you get $10;000,000.  Guess wrong and you get fifty lashes with the cat o' nine tails.  The consequences are enormous, but you cannot make a bad decision guessing heads or tails.  The decision is not hard, just pick heads or tails.  Worrying about what decision you should make is a waste of effort.

One of the things about Americans is that they/we really like doing something.  Americans don't believe in the idea that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all.  Take Syria right now.  What a horrible situation, a chaotic maelstrom of hatred and violence.  Any sane person wants the situation to be improved but not one person can legitimately say that they now what the outcome of almost any action would be.  It may well be, and I believe it is, that anything the USA does will simply make things worse.  That doing anything makes things worse s a more common condition that people think.

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren't afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can't achieve.
Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter's place.
When you handle the master carpenter's tools,
chances are that you'll cut your hand.

Tao Te Ching   Chapter 74