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Comment by aedron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Kind of like Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Many think it's about how he made a bold decision that "made all the difference," but it's really about how it didn't matter which road he took.

Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same

That's not what the poem is saying.

The poem is saying two things:

1. The line you quoted: Even though one of the paths looks special, in fact both are well-trodden paths. The walker is making a decision on imaginary evidence. The poem is mocking the poor decision-making process and retroactive rationalization.

2. (granted, not in the text, but in the context). The poem is about Frost's friend Thomas having trouble deciding deciding whether to volunteer to fight in WWI. Thomas died in the war.

"The road [supposedly] not taken" did make all the difference, but in a negative way. The walker should have used the rigorous method the article proposes.

http://www.historybyzim.com/2014/08/robert-frosts-the-road-n...

Appreciate the correction. I dislike poetry that is not self-contained (and Frost in general), but I guess that would have been common knowledge at the time. I do like Thomas's 'Adlestrop.' It's unfortunate, and probably unsurprising, that Frost meant it in that way, because it cheapens it, but it is what it is.

>The walker should have used the rigorous method the article proposes.

Curious how you'd justify this statement with the text.

I never would have interpreted the poem that way...even given the supposed study we've given it back in the day...i should dig up some poetry and reread, you know, when i find the time.

Yes the coin thing is really good. If you want to flip again, then you know what option you prefer.

I have written a bit about this matter, from the point of view of using I-Ching as your "decision support tool"... https://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html

Thanks. I find it funny that some people who consider themselves rational and open minded are very easily discarding methods like this as superstition without hearing out what you actually have to say. I believe Tarot cards are a somewhat similar way of gaining understanding of your own preferences.

In my opinion yes, any kind of oracle that gives you ambiguous answers is more or less equivalent: I Ching for me is convenient because it gives a relatively compact result (while doing tarot reading requires you to pore over a dozen or so cards and all their relationships, which to me risks to muddle things up).

I always give myself five minutes in which I can flip the coin as many times as I like, but at the end of that I have to go with the face that's showing. It's pretty interesting - I find myself hesitating when it's showing one face more and more. I'm sure part of it is just reinforcing an initial bias once I notice my own hesitation, but magnifying an existing bias is after all the point of the exercise.

>If you want to flip again, then you know what option you prefer.

Nope.

Of course if you see A coming originally and don't want to flip again, then we know that you're OK with A.

But if you do want to flip again, then you just know that you don't prefer A -- you can't deduce from that that you want B.

You can still:

(a) prefer B (b) dislike both

I see this judging Magic: the Gathering a lot. Players will sit there staring at their hand, mulling over various options, all of them bad. And they hesitate to make a play because once they make a play, bad stuff happens. They're constantly trying to convince themselves there's another "good" option if they just stare at their cards long enough.

Nope. All your choices are bad. Make a play.

I think this is a great point generally. People are frequently forced into making one of a number of bad choices. Human circumstance almost always gives us that problem. It is in those situations where “trying to be strategic” really holds us up. Sometimes, things suck in the short run and have no long term value either. I think acknowledging this is why some people can make snap judgements in that situation while others sit in denial.

I have occasionally imagined flipping a coin, on the ground that when the coin is in the air I will know how I'd wish it to fall.

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.

I've watched my wife waffle for ages on decisions she'd clearly already made in her heart of hearts so many times I think you may be on to something.

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