Too many choices -- good or bad -- can be mentally exhausting | Hacker News Reader

Too many choices -- good or bad -- can be mentally exhausting

physorg.com

7 pointsrantfoil7 comments

one trick to avoid exhaustion from too many choices: short circuit when you get a satisfactory outcome, even if it's not optimal. e.g., ordering food at a restaurant or watching tv, if i find a menu item or a program that's good enough and the outcome is not too important to me (those are the cases you should invest extra mental energy to find optimal solutions), i stop scanning there.

the general notion is that your mental energy is valuable currency and should be invested in ways that give you good return.

I have a ball of sticky tape, and I choose whatever it sticks too.

Barry Schwartz claims that choice makes us feel miserable. A very interesting TED talk, see: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/93

He does a great job of outlining the problem, but the only solution he suggests is spectacularly wrong. He says that redistribution of income will make us (those with "too much" income) happier because it will narrow our choices. But it won't. The great thing about money is that you can buy anything with it, including the reduction in number of choices. The cachet for many companies (e.g. Apple, Costco) is exactly that: consistently high quality and limited selection. And it always costs extra.

My biggest motivation for getting rich is not having to deal with insignificant (but unavoidable if you're poor) everyday problems. Being forced to choose is mostly a subset of those problems.

wow, this guy made it to TED? I saw him give this talk at penn, where he argued that we should never "maximize" (spend a lot of time researching) any decision, even seemingly important ones. The example he gave was a professional tennis player who, contrary to popular opinion, shouldn't "maximize" on a tennis racket because the psychological burden of doing all that research outweighed the marginal gain you'd get from buying a super-racket instead of some normal good racket. I also remember he was very unconvincing because that line of reasoning often leads to bad decisions (and rejecting it is what hacking's all about).

Cats don't make choices. I wish I was a cat. Then I'd be happy.

Of course, one should not use such research as an excuse to eliminate choices (as many political types believe). All you need to do is hide the other choices.

A great example of this is the choice of "Desktop or server?"

http://www.ubuntu.com/

In fact, that's barely even a choice. But if you want to choose between other options, you can (at the cost of an extra click):

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/

In my view, this is the proper way to deal with too many choices.

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