Common Causes of Bad Decisions | Hacker News Reader

Common Causes of Bad Decisions

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131 pointsRickJWagner24 comments

It's interesting to also think about why all these reasons are good/reasonable when making decisions.

Example: Incentives can tempt good people to push the boundaries farther than they’d ever imagine.

You often need incentives though to focus people in the right directionn.

Example 2: Tribal instincts reduce the ability to challenge bad ideas because no one wants to get kicked out of the tribe.

It's important to form a tribe, and to maintain its cohesiveness, otherwise you can't really get anything done.

And so on. It's good to consider both sides of each coin.

Regarding example 2, I've always found my personal tribe to be "those who challenge bad ideas." That is our tribe. Thus we stay cohesive as long as collectively never fear from challenging bad ideas.

> Tribal instincts reduce the ability to challenge bad ideas because no one wants to get kicked out of the tribe.

Spot on. In the work place, this is toxic. Especially if on top of this fear of being kicked out, you have a psychopathic boss.

What happens in this scenario? Bad decision after bad decision with workers even though they know it is wrong, won't challenge out of fear.

>So people either willingly nod along with bad ideas, or become blinded by tribal loyalty to how bad the ideas are to begin with.

Damn office sheep....

I've been struggling with this for a long while, so much I'd think to go to study group about the subject or go into sociology.

A place can rot to quite a surprising amount yet people in it won't be able to react.

Office culture is pathological, but I think the extreme rejection-aversion people have is, within the modern world, least maladaptive in the office environment.

We're built to overreact (relative to our modern context) to social rejection because we evolved in small groups. In the bad old days, being rejected or embarrassed in front of your tribe meant you were socially, reproductively, and possibly literally dead. In tribes of 100 people, it made sense to respond strongly to rejection of all forms. In today's world, it doesn't. You get rejected (for jobs, for romantic partnerships, etc.) a lot more, but it's usually harmless. It's "a numbers game"; but our wetware hasn't caught up. Which is why people are so averse to taking social risks, breaking rules even when they should be broken, and pointing out bad ideas.

Thing is, in the office world, we're back in those small tribes where each minuscule rejection or aggression is a possible threat. We're back in the world where being disliked by one or two of the wrong people means catastrophe. So, that's an environment in which is really does make sense to play it safe.

Challenging bad ideas benefits the company. It almost never benefits the person raising the issue. If you're wrong, you look like an idiot. If you're right but not convincing, you look like an idiot. If you're right and you are convincing, someone higher in the power structure will take credit for your idea.

My friend found out the hard way; challenging the ideas of her manager. She now has her head on the chopping block and is under constant passive-aggressive attack by said manager. Her co-worker "friends"....nowhere to be found, no support, no anything except a deafening silence.

All because of fear.

Capitalism has replaced the community with the office. You don't know your neighbors, you see your extended family once a year if that, and it's almost impossible to make friends after age 30 because we live in a stratified world built to keep us apart from each other. But the people who share the (mis?)fortune of selling their time to the same employer, they're the ones you spend all your time with, and they become your community or your small town.

This pushes you to invest yourself emotionally into a community that a wealthier, more powerful person can take away in an instant.

Sorta random, but these comments remind me of that 10th man concept from World War Z: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/12616/is-the-10th...

It makes sense. If a world leader claims that he won an election with 99% of the vote, we assume it was a fraudulent election.

The thing is, in American capitalism, bosses want their underlings to think they have input and think decisions are made by consensus when, in reality, the "right answer" was preselected, and the politically savvy know what it is. Corporates don't actually want workers to have say. They just want the workers to work as hard, and buy in as much, as they would if they actually had a say.

This is also why venture funded companies give employees token stock option allocations even though the percentages are actually a joke. In exchange for options that might be worth $5,000 per year by fair market value, the workers work 50% harder because enough of them are young and inexperienced enough to think they "own the company" in a meaningful way.

>The most comfortable way to think about risk is to imagine a range of potential consequences that don’t seem like a big deal. Then you feel responsible, like you’re paying attention to risk, but in a way that lets you remain 100% confident and optimistic. The problem with low-probability tail risks is that they’re so rare you can get away with ignoring them 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time they change your life.

The other side of the coin for his implicit argument that you should think about these tail end risks is that they're everywhere and in everything we all do commonly, even in fundamentally non-irresponsible activities. Ie: driving your car daily for errands around town will 99.9% of the time result in errands completed more quickly. 1 out of 1000 times, it could result in you killing yourself or someone else, even if you're always perfectly sober when you drive. Thus, while long tails risks shouldn't be forgotten, giving them too much weight as a basis for decision making could easily paralyze one into forfeiting all kinds of activity or choices. It would become a very constricting way to live a life, very quickly. Magnify this possibility accordingly for people who naturally suffer anxiety issues about life.

While I agree with the point you made, I want to point out that the fatality rate for driving an automobile is much lower than 1 in a 1000. In the United States, the number of fatalities per vehicle-mile driven is approximately 1.5e-8[1]. On your average errand run, you have about a one in a hundred million chance of being killed/killing someone.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

By that stat, you have a 1:66M chance per mile, so I think one in a hundred million is at least an order of magnitude too low. Nowhere close to 1:1000, though.

Driving is not necessarily a good example for your point because if people actually focused on behaving remarkably behind the wheel (that would be the "constricting way to live a life"), road accidents would be much less frequent than they are today (which is already way less than 0.01% fortunately).

In reply to both of the comments above, okay, perhaps my driving example wasn't the best. It was the first thing that came to mind, but I think my underlying point remains valid and applies to many other choices that one could commonly make in a life that isn't completely sheltered which nonetheless carry certain catastrophic long-tail risks. Life is by default risky, and all the more so if one lives it with some sense of adventure. this twirls all the way down into a whole series of sub-decisions that you could make inside a single larger decision. To worry too much about catastrophic long-tail risks throughout is a recipe for worrying far too much sometimes.

The problem is that you can decide to pay a lot of attention and drive safely, and still can get hit by a car.

Or even just walking: you could get hit by a car, or get robbed

One other big reason for failure is overseeing luck. Especially if you are new to something and without the judgement of past endeavors you somehow manage success with either sheer luck or with luck having a great role in it, you don't exactly how you achieved success. This results in overlooking potential risks or simply ignoring them. Very good read overall.

R Wilson was 2 yrds from the goal line. The offensive coach called the pass. That was the right decision. A moment later became the wrong decision. Maybe the quality of the decision has nothing to do with the outcome. It has to do with a congruent strategy, regardless of the outcome.

Off-topic: it seems that this website does something very evil with the browser history: when I push the back button, I am instead taken to another article.

Edit: it stopped happening shortly after I posted this comment.

Weird, I had no such issue (with and without an ad blocker)

Yeah, weird, I can't reproduce it now either; I was using an ad blocker (uBlock Origin), too.

Is it really off topic?

Whats the cause of this bad decision?

Happened to me as well, I had to back through 3 articles to get back to HN

I accidentally went to another article multiple times by pressing the left arrow key, instead of the down arrow key which I was using to scroll down.

I enjoyed a first-read of "The Psychology of Human Misjudgement" by Charles "charlie" Munger recently

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