Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking a Decision | Hacker News Reader

Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking a Decision

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34 pointscmcginnis11 comments

It's a fascinating study, but a strange title. The substantive point is that the brain manifests decisions long before consciousness detects them. Not only does the title miss this, it replaces it with something less interesting (and a non sequitur to boot)!

By now there is a whole body of research demonstrating that consciousness doesn't work the way we experience it, and that the identity we believe in and call ourselves is largely illusory. Does anyone know of a book that provides a good survey of these findings? The ones I've run across so far have been disappointing, and the material is so compelling it seems like there ought to be an amazing book on it.

The better known book is of course, Blink http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/031601... . It is very well written, but (IMHO) not as heavy as it should be on references.

Heh, that's amusing given that I just commented on how unsatisfying Gladwell's meta-narratives are in the end (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230782). I have the impression that he could just as easily have written an equally seemingly brilliant book about how people who make spot decisions usually get it wrong.

So no, what I'm looking for is more of a survey of the experimental research on consciousness and identity, the kind of thing that this latest study would fit into. There are a host of such findings and the area seems ripe for an overview. The closest thing I know is "The User Illusion" by Tor Nørretranders. It's a good source on some of this material (e.g. fascinating results on priming which demonstrate that our thinking is conditioned by subliminal perceptions). But it's out of date and also rather shallow (the inevitable tying in of Gödel and all that).

Write one.

No thank you. Writing such a book would be 1000 if not 10000 times harder than reading it. I'm interested enough to do the latter, but not the former.

Overthinking is not to be confused with gathering relevant information.

I'm pretty sure research is still good: know as much about the subject matter as you reasonably need to or are able to, then decide quickly based on that information.

I wonder - Is this why decisions by committees are so terrible?

I'm not sure what they actually say about overthinking. All their experiments deliberately exclude reasoning of any kind. They ask people to make completely arbitrary decisions and then they tell us something about the timing of their incredibly crude measurements. Not very illuminating.

I'll think of this study the next time I find myself overthinking a decision.

Analysis Paralysis ==> Not Having Fun + Having too many expectations

This is SCIENCE!

Jokes aside, their experiment is quite innovative. I would have said their endeavour is impossible.

This is not a matter of consciousness.

It is a matter of speed between the read and the write abilities of the brain. The brain writes faster than it can read, thus creating a latency.

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