Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Happiness [pdf]
gwern.net
gwern.net
I don't know how the coin affected their happiness with the decision they made. All I know is that two generations later, I'm sitting in -9C temperatures in mid-march because of "tails".
Everytime my stream of consciousness stops and starts I am a new person built from the thousands of lives that came before.
This is not a saddening fact but an enlightening one. We all stand on the shoulders of those that came before us.
Instead I let how I feel about the outcome determine the action.
Most of the time a coin toss is not required as I am quite decisive, but if I feel particularly paralysed by an opportunity or decision, and unable to determine the best course of action... then I will toss a coin and look at the outcome, and decide whether or not I feel at peace with the outcome, whether there is regret.
I act on the immediate feeling of the outcome, not the outcome itself.
"Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with" [1]
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8732-sleeping-on-it-b... [2]http://people.hss.caltech.edu/~steve/rightchoice.pdf
Of course, FMRI machines have also diagnosed brain activity in a dead fish, so...
I'm not sure if this method is influenced more or less by subconscious bias but at least you can see your bias come to the surface in the categories and weights you assign.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MUZ4UwnqZJZYN-T2F_td...
Consider deciding whether or not you are going to have ice cream for dessert. On the pro side, ice cream is delicious. On the con side, you are trying to maintain your weight. When the coin goes up in the air of course you are going to be hoping it lands on ice cream, but so what?
Ice cream or not isn't a major life decision, or course, but it could easily stand in for deciding to leave you spouse and family to pursue a love affair, leave your steady job to try a start up, or overextend to buy your dream house. The very fact that you are considering it in the first place means that there is a part of you that very much wants to do it, the question is whether or not it is on the balance a good idea.
'Do what you hope the coin lands on' is like 'follow your dreams'. Good advice for some people, in some circumstances -- especially for young, uncommitted people with access to formal or informal safety nets -- but not for everyone in every circumstance.
A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP
Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
and you're hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No -- not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you're passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you're hoping The great majority of the recruitment for the study was done through social media associated with Freakonomics... in the recruiting for the study, I emphasized that I was only interested in people who were having a difficult time making a life decision... Finally, this is a group which is apparently attracted to the idea of using a coin toss to potentially resolve major life dilemmas.
Also:
Empirical economists are increasingly moving from a role of consumers of data to producers of data. This paper represents an extreme expression of that trend. It is difficult to imagine how one could hope to answer the questions addressed in this paper without generating the data. As the prominence of social media grows, opportunities to recruit subject pools for randomized field experiments from broad swaths of the population will only increase.
I convinced the rest of the participants that choosing was in fact immoral and the only fair way to decide who lived and died was a lottery.
The explanation that Alice the loose woman (really! old material I guess) was getting a new liver because she was lucky was not a well received.
1. Try to save the most lives or years of life (younger or healthier patients).
2. Pick people who will be most helpful given the medical situation (doctors, first responders who will help save others).
3. Randomly via a lottery.
You can listen to folks struggle with the decision. Not much agreement:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/playing-god/ start listening around 35 minutes; I can't find a transcript.
For the sake of an unfamiliar reader, in the problem, we have a man standing by the buffers and an out of control trolley car. We're asked to choose between pulling a lever, which will divert the car to the buffers, thus killing the man but saving the people on board the car, or not pulling the lever, which results in the deaths of the trolley passengers but allows the man to live.
Choice one:
The out of control car is 'not your fault' but deliberately choosing to kill the man would be. You couldn't live with yourself knowing you'd been the cause of his death. You opt not to pull the lever.
Choice two:
That's crazy. None of this is your fault but it's your 'responsibility' to choose now. It's a simple utilitarian calculus - more lives = better. You pull the lever.
My problem with all this is that either response (and people split on the response) is nothing more than a reflection of the unconscious biases of the respondent. This is revealed when we discover that by changing the framing slightly - e.g. asking the question in another language (a different part of the brain is engaged = more utilitarians) or making the killing of the innocent man a direct act (you push him off an overpass = more 'not my faults') - changes the balance of responses in statistically significant ways.
The right answer, of course, is to toss a coin and do what it tells you.
The trolley problem makes an inherent assumption that value can be summed by adding up people (i.e., more people > less people), and therefore there's only one truly correct answer, but that's not how decisions are actually made in the real world and there are very good reasons for that.
For instance: why is there a group of people and then the separate individual? Does the group have something in common? Is there something special about the individual? Someone made a judgment call when they created the situation. The end result is now unknown, and my answer would be that the decision therefore doesn't matter.
Choosing to do something would require performing another judgment call, which is actually very problematic. This is demonstrated fairly well by one of the reframings of the problem: the one where a surgeon kills a healthy person to save 5 dying patients. A world in which such things happen would be considered quite terrible by many, yes this seems to be a valid implementation of the trolley problem. The surgeon could then take his 5 patients and the one healthy person and recreate a trolley scenario and then let someone else deal with it. The correct answer, according to a person who doesn't want healthy travelers sacrificed for people who need organs, would be to not touch the lever. Yet, they do not have access to this information, so they do not know what the end result is. So the decision doesn't matter.
The responsibility is indeed with whoever has created the situation. Another party getting involved may make it better or worse by sheer luck but "more people > less people" is, in my opinion, a horrible philosophy and this implicit assumption should be thrown out of the problem. Once you do that, though, the problem disintegrates.
I would generally be wary of critique of intuition based on failure in hypotheticals. Intuition wasn't designed around hypotheticals and doesn't believe in them.
To be really useful, you need to consider these thought experiments in the least convenient world - assume that there is explicitly no way to avoid the central point (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2k/the_least_convenient_possible_wor... for further reading). So in this case, it doesn't matter 'whose fault' the predicament is. You don't know anything about the individuals involved except the number killed by each of two choices. "Optimise net lives saved" is indeed a horrible strategy, but under the least convenient possible circumstances can you come up with a better one?
Your comment on intuition failing on hypothetical scenarios is on the mark, and that's the point of this kind of scenario - to see in what way intuition fails, and how it will fail in different directions based on presentation (eg. we'll passively let 5 people die rather than actively killing one, but we'll save 5 people even if it involves indirectly killing one.)
In other threads, ppl talk about if there is a stream of consciousness that we come from. I believe it is a stream of fate. A person inherits luck from past actions, whether they be from this life, from their ancestry (grandparents choosing a country), and from previous lives (knowing - really knowing - something is the wrong thing - that moral inner voice or unreasonable fear of it).
Luck can be increased through right action or ritual. It can be passed on to your children and grandchildren.
This belief allows me to be fearless as I go about my daily activities as I know I am always improving my future lot.
and you're hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No — not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you're passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you're hoping
-Piet Hein
Edit: HN is not friendly towards quoting poems.
The adult part of me wish I kept a record of what happened as I could have published some of the stories. But the 18 year old me who was willing to decide his life by a toss of a coin was hardly going to be the same 18 year old who was responsible enough to keep a record of his activities.
For what it's worth though, it was a pretty fun month.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/534289.The_I_Ching_or_Bo...
Difficult to follow through with on the larger scale, though - which is where the little synchronicities come in.
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
It is worth remembering that Frost's point is that it actually doesn't make any difference.
That is to say I think there's a nice irony in the fact that I often hear people espouse that (clearly correct) opinion with the implication it is a better interpretation but has fewer subscribers.
The crux is in the 2 paragraphs starting with "Frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head", and the main claim is:
"According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance)."
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misr...
As for why - I couldn't tell you, but it made sense at the time.
Individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are much more likely to make a change and are happier six months later than those who were told by the coin to maintain the status quo.
In practice, it's likely the choice of reported happiness over a six month followup period as the indicator of whether it worked is the major factor here; many negative aspects of a decision take much longer to take effect (get even more bored/frustrated with the new job, miss their ex despite the shortcomings in their relationship, realise that going back to school is costing a lot of money and not advancing them in any way)
It's possible that the larger fraction of people who are happy six months after making the change they agonised over is entirely cancelled out if you ask them after 24.
[1]the paper seems to suggest the coin had a statistically significant impact on the sample group's decision making even if their ex ante predictions of their probability of making the change were greater or less than 50%
You have plenty of noise in the inputs that determine your actions by way of brain, even without coins, but it's still the state of your brain + those inputs that determine the next state of your brain and therefore your actions.
Wittgenstien's view that most philosophical problems of dissolve by understanding that the question involved is nonsensical or not defined properly.
I think events
1. follow Cause -> Effect (Casual)
2. Or they Random (If we don't find evidence for a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics)
There is no 3rd option. Some people try to derive free will from randomness, which means they are essentially saying that their "free will" is equivalent to blind selection without any regard for causes, which contradicts the normal common sense(nonsense?) use of the word.
You are the set of reactions to external stimuli that a certain system goes through.
Alan Watts -
“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ”
Also the insights of Alan Watts in the book 'The Way of Zen' and others on Free will and Determinism is eye opening.
I think one has to examine whether the feeling of a separate "I" who has to surf through tides of fate is real.
I think in meditation, or in moments of spontainety brought about anything that gets one in the "Flow" helps to fade the distinction of a observer and the observed ?
This sort of thing happens frequently enough to dispel both (soft) determinism and free will as viable concepts, IMHO. We all live in a Gaussian game, where everything that occurs is the sum of an unknowable and indeed unimaginable number of factors. The sum of a vast number of of random numbers may still be deterministic, in the sense that it could be rederived from a perfect copy of the system's original state, but I'd argue that this insight cannot possibly be useful since there's no way to store or represent such a copy in any environment where the original "me" is able to manipulate it.