The Problem of Thinking Too Much (2003) [pdf]
statweb.stanford.edu
statweb.stanford.edu
To be honest, the academic discussion doesn't shed much light on the practical problem. Here's an illustration: Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford.I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion. Finally, one of them said, "You're one of our leading decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility. "Without thinking, I blurted out, "Come on, Sandy, this is serious."
The same story, minus the "Sandy", is attributed to the pseudonym Triffat in Antifragile. In light of this text, I think Taleb mischaracterized Diaconis. At least I never would have imagined that the quote was a story "Triffat" was telling about himself!
When he moved from Cornell to Caltech, he had a sort of Buridan's Ass situation where each one would beat the other's offer and leave him with no way to make a decision. Even the weather wouldn't cooperate, with the snow driving him out of Cornell and smog driving him out of Caltech. He eventually landed at Caltech, basically arbitrarily, and realized the solution to the problem:
"But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing—absolutely nothing—would ever change my mind again. When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about—should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind—nothing is going to change your mind."
So when Chicago came calling later, trying to recruit him, he refused. Didn't listen to the offer, didn't consider it when they told him, just refused outright over his prior condition. Interesting to see how many people have decided that formal analysis is a hopeless way of approaching this problem.
If everything changes they have nothing over the younger competition.
"The Old know too much to not take any risks; the Young do not know enough to not take any risks; and what amazes me is how they achieve it time after time."
Paradoxically, I think that the "Dunning–Kruger effect" (within limits) is actually necessary for us to evolve. Think about it; if you don't jump into the unknown with confidence, you won't learn/do anything. It is important to assess risk but also know when to stop obsessing over risk.
This resonates with me. I spend so much time doubting my ability to make the right decision (or whether I have the skills to accomplish X), I end up doing nothing.
This applies to buying a car, or even jumping into a new project at work.
For me, my gut has generally been more right than my over-analytical mind. But I have a number of friends where I think it's the other way around.
There's an interesting result from studying people's prediction accuracy in which they improve simply by being asked to think about their answers and whether they're sure. For me, overthinking often leads me to explain away 'irrational' reactions that were quite accurate, but taking at least one extra look to say "has my first reaction missed something fundamental" is a lifesaver.
I think they mean deciding on the basis of preverbal emotional reactions, rather than on explicit values. That decision could be in reaction to outcomes you've already put a lot of thought into predicting, though.
The thing is, you simply have no way to know. What exact future you'll end up with is about as predictable as the weather on this day five years from now. You have no idea who are the people you haven't yet met that are going to change your life, what roadblocks you'll find on the way, whether you'll suddenly fall into a depression, etc. You can only rely on objective metrics (trends, statistics), testimonials, and general gut feeling.
For myself, 3 years ago, after my studies, I was wondering whether I should relocate to silicon valley for a big tech job or not. It was scary. I loved my hometown, had many friends, etc. I figured, however, that I might as well do this sort of experiment (moving to another city/country) while I'm young and have no spouse or property. I did make the move, and unfortunately, I didn't enjoy my big tech job, nor did I enjoy living in silicon valley, it wasn't a good experience, so I moved back, thankfully with a decent wad of cash to wipe my tears with.
I didn't like silicon valley, but I don't regret my decision to try it. Why, because I also knew that I kind of had to try it, because if I didn't, there might always be some FOMO in the back of my mind (what if I'd taken this big silicon valley job, would my live be better right now?). Now I've done it, I've been there, and I know what it's like. The pressure/temptation is gone. So my two cents are to trust your gut, do commit to decisions, and also don't be overly afraid of experimenting when you're young: it might not work out, but you'll learn something along the way.
Coincidentally, I'm reading the book because I'm trying to decide whether to leave my small city teaching job at a and move to SV to get a big tech job. And the book and your experience suggest that it is better to leave and fail to thrive than to never leave at all. But may I ask why didn't you like it, or what should I look out for?
Turns out I both loved and hated it. I ended up only staying gone for about a year and moved back to the city I had left. I still don't regret that decision, I'm significantly happier now than I was. I think of radical life changes as tools for perspective, by doing what I did I realize how little of what I have I need and how easy it is to create a new life if the one I have isn't suiting me.
One thing I didn't like was living in the silicon valley suburbs. It felt like a small town with nothing going on for me. It was really car-centric, my apartment came with a covered parking spot because they just assumed that of course you have a car. If I had to do it again I'd get a job in SF and live in SF. I don't want long commutes and I don't want to live in suburbs. Since you're from a small town, YMMV. The SV suburbs might feel like a big upgrade to you, and having to drive everywhere might be something you're already used to.
Another thing was that the work was dry. This might be very different for you based on what employer and job you pick. My team was doing mostly maintenance and incremental upgrades on a product many years old. I found that dreadfully boring. I need something creative. This is something I didn't know then. My current job doesn't pay nearly as much but the work offers a lot more novelty and creative freedom. If I had to do it again, I'd make sure to join a team that's working on a project that has me genuinely excited, preferably a team that's building something rather than doing maintenance.
It was also really hard for me to be uprooted from my hometown where I'd always lived and away from my friends. What made it even harder was that I fell into a depression right before moving to California. My mother was suddenly hospitalized, right as I was going through other stressful things and preparing for an international move. The extra stress was too much. Then I landed in California, and I had to start my first job, and I didn't have any friends there to support me. It's hard to boostrap a network of friends starting from nobody, and it's even harder when you're depressed... You have no energy to go out and you're coming from a place where you need people to help and support you, rather than a place of "I'm a fun person to spend time with".
Lastly, while I lived in California, after being on antidepressants for a bit and feeling more hopeful again, I tried dating, and I hated my experience. It feels, to me, like SV has an overabundance of men, because of the constant inflow of tech workers. If you're a single guy, you're moving to a place where there are too many men. In any other city, being a successful tech worker is something that will earn you points, but in SV, every woman knows they could date a Google engineer if they wanted to, at least that's how it seemed to me. Lots of ghosting and being treated in ways that I found disrespectful. To make matters more complicated, lots of people in and around SF are polyamorous, which is not something I want to get involved with.
May I ask how do you feel now about your current life? Did you leave the States?
If you're asking if I'm happy, I would say I'm definitely more emotionally stable. I've been at the same job since I came back and currently don't plan to leave. I still feel down from time to time, not completely fulfilled, but I think I'd feel that way anywhere. I feel a little lost these days because I don't really know what I want to do with my life. I feel like I lack purpose.
Dating here in a big city seems easier than in the Silicon Valley suburbs. It's tricky (because dating is tricky), but I have no trouble getting dates. I did lose touch with many acquaintances after being away for a year. Party friends, when you stop going out with them regularly, stop thinking about you. I have a small number of close friends that I had before I left and I generally feel like I get enough social.
Choosing a college may be a cost, but for now there are workable alternatives.
And you always have the way to know or at least roughly estimate which is good enough for a sane decision. You just take the cost of acquiring information into your decision time and you're gold. Apply hard limit for time and problem disappears. You did the best you could given the constraints.
In fact, the typical problem today is that you have too many ways to know and not enough ways to verify veracity.
On regrets and mistakes, Jordan Peterson talks about this sort of thing in a beautiful way as the idea of "redemptive mistakes", and that "people are a lot more unhappy when they look back in their lives about the things they didn't do than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things" - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGDnSWmqhM]. It has stuck with me as I try to be more permissive of myself making mistakes and being imperfect.
There's a clear spectrum between recklessness on one end, indecision and inaction on the other and doing right things right in the middle, spontaneously or in a planned way.
Relevancy is key, nobody remembers things that are irrelevant by definition as a regret... Cost is a kind of relevancy.
Going back to the article, you almost completely lost contact with the original problem once you're past third or rarely fourth order thinking because you will lack enough particular data to decide on any measure of success, with exception of particularly structured recursive problems. Welcome to decision variant of Goedel's second. Decisions and axioms (data points) are countable.
So indeed, if you can't decide, spin a penny. You save time and the outcome will be similar.
Even fancy things like Oblique Strategies and Tarot often seem to provide the same value; they spit out some directed randomness that gets us from thinking about the problem to expecting outcomes.
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.
I do seem to recall a research paper that showed that the coin trick worked well, in an experimental setting with people deciding whether to get married or break up!
The only sure fire thing I've found helps is you imagine the realistic worst possible case scenario if you decide on doing thing A (the thing you really want) and if you can live with that, do thing A.
Imagine you're a programmer and you're in some kind of professional rut. You consider your options. You could learn a functional language, maybe get into mobile development, find something else to do altogether, or any other of myriad paths. If you think long and hard enough about any single option you can probably convince yourself it's the right choice. Or maybe you get overwhelmed and just give up. The question is too abstract and so are the alternatives hence the overthinking.
What I do is take the abstract and make it concrete. Instead of looking at this monster problem from the inside, I picture the end result. What am I actually trying to accomplish; what will my life look like when I do. When I see that and it usually comes pretty easily, what to do is simple. Ask myself what's the very next specific action I can take to accomplish that vision. If the answer isn't obvious I get even more specific. Maybe I need to literally get up out of my chair. Whatever. I do that thing, ask the question again, do the next thing, then the next until I'm done.
> One of the most useful things to come out of mystudy is a collection of the rules of thumb my friends use in their decision making. For example, one of my Ph.D. advisers, Fred Mosteller, told me, “Other things being equal, finish the job that isnearest done.” A famous physicist offered this advice: “Don’t waste time on obscure fine pointsthat rarely occur.” I’ve been told that Albert Einstein displayed the following aphorism in his office: “Things that are difficult to do are beingdone from the wrong centers and are not worth doing.” Decision theorist I. J. Good writes, “The older we become, the more important it is to usewhat we know rather than learn more.” Galen offered this: “If a lot of smart people have thought about a problem [e.g., God’s existence, life on other planets] and disagree, then it can’t be decided.”
> 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 affairwhile you’re passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you’re hoping.
I noticed that my 'internal dialogue' was what started anxiety spirals and depression.
Meditation and mindfulness practice seem to help. I think that just like any muscle, the brain can be exercised in a certain direction. But holy shit is it infuriating to start meditating. Do you realize how much time you spend in your own head? Like all of it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/willburns/2018/02/26/the-beckle...
What's happening in the brain exactly that gives people an advantage? What is the brain science behind microdosing LSD?
The effects of microdosing in the brain are not known, which is why I am setting up an international research program to investigate how microdosing, both acutely and after repeated doses, may produce changes in brain function. Our results with higher doses of LSD show that LSD revealed important changes in the way different brain regions communicate with each other, resulting in a more integrated and fluid brain state. The Beckley/Imperial Research Program found that LSD makes the brain much more connected and flexible.
Both the psilocybin and LSD studies showed a decrease in blood flow to the “default mode network” (DMN), meaning there was less activity in the parts of the brain that repress other parts that maintain the normal, restricted status quo. The DMN is activated when the mind is wandering, not committed to a task, but overlooking the past and planning the future, and thinking about one’s self and one’s emotional state. An overactive DMN underlies the excessive rumination associated with psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder. A microdose likely lessens the rigidity of the DMN, making the brain more flexible.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5853825/
Second, like Huxley’s cerebral reducing valve and Freud’s ego, EBT argues that the DMN’s organizational stronghold over brain activity can be both an evolutionary advantage and a source of pathology. “It is argued that this entropy-suppressing function of the human brain serves to promote realism, foresight, careful reflection and an ability to recognize and overcome wishful and paranoid fantasies. Equally however, it could be seen as exerting a limiting or narrowing influence on consciousness” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 7). Carhart-Harris et al. (2014) point out that neuroimaging studies have implicated increased DMN activity and RSFC with various aspects of depressive rumination, trait neuroticism, and depression. “The suggestion is that increased DMN activity and connectivity in mild depression promotes concerted introspection and an especially diligent style of reality-testing. However, what may be gained in mild depression (i.e., accurate reality testing) may be offset by a reciprocal decrease in flexible or divergent thinking (and positive mood)” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 10).
Third, consistent with both psychoanalytic and filtration theory, is the notion that psychedelic drugs’ capacity to temporarily weaken, collapse, or disintegrate the normal ego/DMN stronghold underpins their therapeutic utility. “Specifically, it is proposed that psychedelics work by dismantling reinforced patterns of negative thought and behavior by breaking down the stable spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity upon which they rest” (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014, p. 1).
This book is often recommended:
https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Explorers-Guide-Therapeut...
>For example, a 26-year-old young man in Brasov was detained by DIICOT after being intercepted to order such a thing
DIICOT is like the DEA of my country. I can't get my hand on that
There is a cryptic message in here that I don't quite understand, I'd try sending this guy a PM (from a mature reddit account that would feel trustworthy to not be a cop). At least he may be able to point you in some direction.
https://www.reddit.com/r/shrooms/comments/7obvvn/growing_kit...
You can contact me with the email in the bio if you don't like it (not many people use keybase anyways)
Let's say I'm trying to do X.
- Level 0 might be: do the first thing that comes to mind
- Level 1 may be 'consider your possible choices and do a cost-benefit analysis'
Most people would say that Level 1 is preferable, but only for 'weighty' decisions where the cost of thinking is outweighed by the benefit of making a better decision. For example, nobody does rational deliberation for 'should I brake at this red light?'
So in practice, we seem to do some level of rational metacognition that takes into account the cost of thinking about a problem.
What about level 3? Are there large classes of problems where it's not really worth it to 'think about whether to think' - you should always ponder them, or never? And what about levels beyond yet?
A friend introduced me to a related version of this that works pretty well: toss a coin, see what result comes out, and then decide if you are happy or disappointed. If you still don't care, go with the coin. Or don't; it doesn't matter.
Another related article: Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness Steven D. Levitt https://www.nber.org/papers/w22487
They have been so detached from problem solving that they forget how to problem solve.
Modeling a human randomness with math didn't give you perfect data and conclusions?
What was the original problem? To solve something unsolvable with our current understanding of biology?
Industry asks better questions and finds solutions. Academia waddles around in theoreticals, and makes minimal meaningful progress.
Edit, to clarify. Academia picks a unreal problem, and can't find a logic driven solution. Industry picks real problems, and doesn't make money unless they solve it. We should be learning to solve problems from Industry, not our underachieving professors.
Industry is a process of commercialising added value.
They both add to society in different ways, and their outcomes aren’t really comparable.
I won't defend all of academia but it is clear that sometimes there's a cache of 'useless knowledge' that suddenly gets cashed in when industry reaches a point where it is actually needed (most famous example being number theory and cryptography).
The whole point of academia is for it to be a space for the free exploration of unknown intellectual domains. This exploration will often be worthless but may occasionally bear fruit in completely civilization changing ways.
Meanwhile, industry is too busy manipulating the evaluation criteria to make problems magically go away to actually solve anything (this is the counter strawman to your strawman).
Seriously though, our econonic systems do not seem to be able to evaluate survival as an important concept. There is no evidence that industry will move by itself in a direction that sacrifices profits to avoid pollution, someone else will just say he did the same and offer a cheaper product.
What we want is for our political systems to be more robust and for the gradient between academia and industry to be more smooth. What we have is broken in too many ways to count.