People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes | Hacker News Reader

People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes

robkhenderson.substack.com

252 pointsBostonian121 comments

I don't think this is a paradox at all.

If an option is perceived to be significantly better, then the decision can be made quickly.

Otherwise more study is required to decide which is better, or if they are actually indistinguishable.

It's the same reason why more trials of an experiment are required to reject the null hypothesis when the effect of the experimental variable is very weak. This is analogous to considering the options in your mind until you decide the difference between them is too small to matter. That takes time!

Sometimes after deep thought, you may decide one of them is actually better, but not by very much. Obviously you could argue that time is wasted for such a small benefit, but it's not a paradox.

Introductory statistics tells us we can never prove the null hypothesis; all we can do is reject or fail to reject it. In other words, you give up on the attempt only after deciding extended study is unlikely to reject it.

It is not a paradox but it can be irrational. When the two choices have similar utility the cost of distinguishing them is high and the benefit of making the correct choice is low. There is a crossover point where it does not matter which option you choose, putting more effort into your decision can only leave you worse off, and this article claims we tend to continue putting in the effort well past that point.

> this article claims we tend to continue putting in the effort well past that point.

it's because people have the irrational belief that their thinking and reasoning more about a problem/decision makes their outcome better.

I think the common symptom found in software is design analysis paralysis. A software team end up using tonnes of time fretting about design choices (often as a committee), rather than just use that time to implement one of the designs. The (ir)rational idea that by reasoning about the design up-front, one saves the (potential) time lost in reimplementing a different design in the future!!

It can be worth agonizing over the decisions early on while the system is simple and easy to change. Later on it's often not logistically, politically or socially justifiable to go back and fix or improve an original bad design decision and re-base and retest everything built on it.

The result is engineers sat around muttering "I told you so" to themselves and wasting weeks debugging and hacking around bugs.

I find that the agonizing rarely bears as much fruit as doing.

In some cases we've deployed, found horrible problems that were completely unexpected and switched course.

Additional time spent agonizing would just have delayed getting us to the point where we learned those things. The critical information we needed to make that decision wasnt going to reveal itself with additional introspection.

This isnt to day when a dev waves a big red flag in the beginning you should ignore them, though (ever). But, I find that waving that red flag doesnt ever inhibit delivery speed whereas multiple people agonizing over decisions where the information to determine the "right" one usually does.

Sure. Now we need to know when it can be worth. If we do it all the time we're back to the starting point of this discussion.

This! Often (actually almost always) time it self is valuable for multiple reasons. Spending precious time in the "meeting room" instead of progressing towards (almost any) implementation can decrease the overall value and increase the risks.

Also some people strongly prefer action over deliberation, especially by a committee so there is also a psychological cost to the team to consider.

With software and a capable team, there can still be an illusion that decisions are cast in stone and can't be changed later, while the opposite is true.

Implementing a solution that is almost there and then making corrections can be both more satisfying and lead to very good results. This of course requires the psychological freedom an flexibility to quickly acknowledge errors in thinking and design and not holding on to "the plan" too tightly.

I’ve argued for just building POC approach at times and worked out great sometimes. I found the issue was usually with management. Many have been extremely reluctant to throwing away code. Even though writing POC and re-doing everything will take the same time as planning for ages and doing it once.

Proof Of Concept.

> it's because people have the irrational belief that their thinking and reasoning more about a problem/decision makes their outcome better.

i'm not sure this is correct. i bet it often comes down to whether we've found an [emotionally] satisfying answer/outcome.

Definitely trying out different alternative designs is a good idea. But it has its cost as well. But you are right it is usually better to try out something than just ponder all the possibilities.

Sure, but how do you know a given decision is one of those decisions?

For me it should be intuitive. My test is "Will I accept either outcome if I flip a coin?". Is so, flip the coin. If not, pick the option that prevents me from flipping a coin.

The issue is it is hard to know whether the two (or more) choices are equally good.

If you have no way of knowing which choice is better then you would flip the coin of course. The problem is there typically is a way to possibly learn more about which is better, AND HOW MUCH, by studying the choices. The "How much" -part is crucial. One choice might lead to core meltdown.

Often such study does not provide any further information about which is better. But it might. You just don't know. Except if you are lucky and the answer is immediately obvious.

So if it looks like you have two choices A and B, it is more typically the case that you in fact have THREE choices:

1. Choose A

2. Choose B

3. Spend more time studying which is better, and how much, A or B

>The issue is it is hard to know whether the two (or more) choices are equally good.

If the choice doesn't matter much, then both options are equally good.

E.g. "should I get this pair of shoes or that? I like both".

Just get one and get on with it.

"Should I go to Paris or Vienna for a short trip?"

Just pick one and get on with it.

Still people obsess for these kind of choices for needlessly long...

The case discussed, were people waste time they shouldn't, is (a) when the choice doesn't matter much or (b) when you do know that either option would be more or less fine (which is basically a variant of (a)).

If (c) you can't tell if they're equally good AND chosing the right one does have a BIG impact, then this case doesn't fall under the advice of TFA or what we discuss here.

Rather, it's an "ipportant choice" and people should think it over...

Yes of course if you "know" that the choice doesn't matter and you still obsess with it then it is your fault. I don't know how much that happens in practice, and I wouldn't blame people much for doing that because maybe they enjoy doing it.

Based on my own experience as a SW developer I have found that more often it is hard to know beforehand whether a design-choice matters much or not, and how much.

I suppose that is also the reason for much of "Technical Debt". People make less than optimal design choices not because they are bad designers, but because trying to evaluate the benefits of each choice would be too time-consuming.

My algorithmic approach:

You spend a fixed amount of time, if no choice could be made during this period, then flip the coin.

The fixed amount of time could be as short as five seconds. Or the amount that makes sense to you, and you feel comfortable with. If it's one week for you, then it is.

Personally, I like the strategy of flipping a coin as soon as the preference is not obvious, and then picking the other one if you realize you don’t like the coin flip.

I love this approach, it's effectively a forcing mechanism for revealing preference.

But the original question remains, how do you know that until you have analyzed it?

For certain types of decisions, one can safely rely on prior experience. I know to a high degree of certainty that most entrees at a moderate to high quality restaurant have roughly the same value, therefore choosing quickly is best because there's little to discover and little to gain from the discovery. Many aesthetic choices or choices of mere preference are like this. Other classes of issues are known in advance to be both trickier and yield real, effective outcome differences, these are often big life decisions that act as life's value centers, e.g., which house, which partner, which employer, etc.

It's of course possible to be wrong in either direction -- this difference matters though i think it doesn't and vice versa -- but in general, we tend to be pretty good about taking seriously the things that really are serious, but pretty bad at not wasting time on things that don't matter much. This shows up in the paradox of choice, but really just imagine someone hemming and hawing over two brands of cereal in the aisle at Trader Joe's and you get the picture.

So the practical problem isn't really "how do you know until you analyze," because we more often fall into opposite the trap and waste time systematically attempting to optimize choices where there is little value to be gained. We should step back in more cases and remind ourselves that most differences make no difference at all. Save your time and energy for the ones that do.

A similar problem occurs on the big questions too, like when choosing an employer or university. On big questions often times much of the differences are unknowable.

Big decisions are often like icebergs. Most of the important stuff is hidden below the surface. No matter how much you analyze the tip you still have an essentially 50% chance of getting the decision wrong. It's really hard to make a major decision knowing that you have a 50% chance of getting the decision wrong, but over-analyzing the tip of the iceberg is not going to improve your decision making.

I think the process of making good decisions about "big" things should involve practicing making many more decisions about smaller things and evaluating the outcome.

There are a lot of insightful heuristics from decision making that can make big decisions much better/easier/etc.

I don't think people would spend any more time on big decisions if they made faster/fewer decisions with little "value" to gain, if anything I think their habit of making fast decisions would mean they spend less time/worse on the big ones!

For sure, sharpening analysis chops is a good reason, but in a world of finite time, and an overabundance of important decisions to make regarding one's life, there's no shortage of analysis fodder to begin with.

And no doubt that sometimes it's just nice and pleasurable and interesting to deliberate over anything at all, making small things grand, but it's also good to know when it's actually optional.

Flip a coin and it will make your decision for you.

While it may be easy to label it as irrational post hoc, it might not be clear beforehand without the expended effort in evaluation. There is no paradox, just an information asymmetry in time.

I reject the hypothesis that this is a matter of irrationality. The error in this line of thinking lies with the fact that you have implicitly equated "have similar utility" with "have similar visible utility".

The reason "obvious" choices are "easy" is not because of the difference in actual utility, but because of the difference in "obviousness". I.e. it relates your observation to the probability that it does indeed relate to a difference in utility of not.

Therefore, two options with "similar visible utility" require more effort discerning whether the "actual" utility is also small, or you're about to make a very big mistake based on superficial notions of "no visible difference".

I content that given knowledge of actual equivalence, the paradox goes away and choices become trivial again.

A good example is phone contracts (at least in the UK). You'll spend far more time weighing options if they're bundled with all sorts of dark pattern magic like "first 3 months free then £X plus promo vouchers in select stores", compared to when you only have the annual price to compare between two choices. But it wouldn't matter if that price difference is £100 or £1.

A friend was spending forever trying to decide which of two toothpastes to buy at Target. The cost of avoiding calculating which is better by just buying both was only $3. In cases like that I think it's irrational to spend so much time thinking about it.

A grandmaster logician descends from logic heaven to tell you it was actually rational and asks you to figure out why that it so. What is your response?

It might be one of these:

A) the benefits are higher than you think: e.g. little did you know it but they have an unusual mouth microbiome which means some toothpastes will work and the rest will turn them into a wimpering ball of cavities within the week. They don't quite remember /which/ ones though and are trying to figure that out.

B) the costs are lower than you think: this friend is funemployed and has nothing else they would rather be doing with their time, in fact they find a great deal of satisfaction from knowing they have "optimized" every area of their life by spending more time on their decisions.

Price is not only money for the purchase. Aferwards, it increases the effort of cleaning teeth, on the left using one, and on the right using the other, over the next 5 years, before making a final choice based on results at the dentist.

At which point both of them will have been upgraded with different ingredients.

With the caveat that I'm just an internet commentator that doesn't know what I'm talking about.

> Sometimes after deep thought, you may decide one of them is actually better, but not by very much.

I feel like the value here is simply not for the decision at hand. It's that you learn something for future decisions.

When the options are very close, there's not much value to be gained for this decision, but it indicates there is something new to learn. When the options are obviously far apart, there's nothing to learn.

I've thought about this on and off in the context of poker. When you're playing 24 tables at the same time you simply can't waste focus in the moment on the close calls unless the pot is big. Instead, analyze the things you think are close calls offline.

The irrationality presumes:

1. That the decision-making activity itself is wasteful. 2. That the decision-making time would, if not consumed by decision making, be spent elsewhere in a more productive manner.

These are hardly safe assumptions. The discussion itself can be enjoyable. The faster decision making can create less certainty in the decision and encourage regret, or create conflict with others. The time gained may not be spent in any productive manner but instead be wasted elsewhere.

Yeah, weird not to see any mention of time pressure. If you’re sitting in some psychology student’s lab and you know you’ve already agreed to participate in their coursework experiment for the next hour, you might spend a few minutes carefully choosing between two very close options. If you’re in a real life situation where you are presented with two very close options, and you need to get home in time for dinner, you are more likely to just decide at random.

Yeah, but slower decision making may also create conflict with others. For my career choice, I struggled to decide for a very long time, and switched decision after knowing additional information (salary raise, scholarship), which drived some people mad.

I'm not sure which decision is better, considering they are so different and probably are not comparable. I just chose to do a postgraduate degree that seems more interesting, and leaves me more options later, rather than going to the industry which can make more money.

Note that your situation does not match the ones of the blog post. The article discusses several easily comparable options with clear valuation to the subject. Your situation describes a choice with incomplete information between two alternatives.

To dive into your setting: one challenge is that there are multiple optimisation strategies. Do you want to avoid risk as much as possible? Do you want the largest possible income? The highest job satisfaction? The best career path? Etc.

Note that even if you pick one of these as your sole optimisation factor, the choice is not clear. Eg. an industry position can make more money... or you have not-great luck, a string of mediocre jobs with little career growth and little payout. Or even bad luck and end up in jobs where you're a bad fit, learning nothing of career value to you and burning out repeatedly.

On top of that, any advice from experience would be tainted by survivor bias and its inverse; that is, "i liked the outcome, so do that" / "i hated that outcome, so don't do that".

Lastly, it isn't even clear (not can it ever be determined) that the downsides of choice paralysis are worse than the downsides of making the "lesser" choice. Maybe driving people this mad beats having to live in their couch for 6 months. Or maybe it doesn't.

In the end, your alternatives present a very complex scenario, in which no alternative can be fully explored without committing to it.

Your point is literally made in the article:

"Sometimes the decision-making process itself is pleasurable. Even if all outcomes will be equally rewarding, spending time discussing options with others or privately mulling them over might be satisfying."

Which is why I enjoy buying things at Costco. They usually have one widget of a particular type. And historically for me at least, they seem to be proficient at choosing good widgets. Thus, my only choice is whether I want it or not, not then another choice of which one do I want.

That is also the reason I dislike languages like Perl and Groovy. They have too many ways of doing the same thing.

Web-design is another good example. There are typically so many ways of accomplishing something, that I actually don't spend much time thinking about it. But then later I found I could have done simpler and better with another approach.

In terms of language design, absolutely.

Giving "free" choices to users just makes it more confusing. It's better to have one way of doing things than three that are kinda like the same but don't offer many advantages.

Optional for optional's sake doesn't help.

So what would you say then is “the Costco of programming languages”?

I would say Go.

I think when coding the only "decisions" to be made were whether to make things public or not, whether to use pointer receivers or not (even that wasn't usually a decision), and how to do error handling (no language is going to do that for you).

Go was at version 1.5 (2015) when my copy of The Go Programming language was release and there has been exactly ONE major language feature: Generics.

Here's from my Go notes on releases:

Releases: https://go.dev/doc/devel/release

(Since 1.5, my book's version) 1.9: type aliases, type T1 = T2 (Since 1.12, when I last learned Go) 1.13: number literals improved, godoc removed from core: go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc godoc 1.14: overlapping interfaces, https://tinyurl.com/2fcyrnqm 1.17: slice to array conv https://tinyurl.com/y3xvpwud 1.18: GENERICS

My “anti shampoo aisle” strategy (that drives my wife mad) is to stop at the first item that satisfies my requirements.

“You didn’t even look at the back of the menu!!”

“Good point. I’ll start reading menus from random locations each time.”

I like this! I have a slightly different one but I'll try yours next time I am out.

Mine is:

'I like being surprised, if you have any love it or hate it "controversial" items I'd like to try that, otherwise surprise me :-)'

Along with a genuinely friendly demeanor it is almost always a delight.

Worst case scenario they just give me the most popular item on the menu, occasionally I get something weird tasting but never bad and always fun.

No menu required.

That's my hack when life is demanding that I make too many decisions and I'd like someone else to be taken care of that at meal time.

(Only when the server and environment doesn't seem soul crushing/crushed, I would never do this at a chotchkie's.)

I did something like this at a French restaurant (in the UK) and received dire warnings about the andouillette being quite different to what I might expect.

Apparently they get sent back more often than they're eaten. I thought it was delicious (certainly not good if you don't like tripe!) and demolished it. The waiter confided that it's the one food that most reminded him of home, which was a human moment I still remember that I wouldn't have had if I'd ordered a steak frites.

I need to try this sometime. It's all too easy for me to just stick with the "safe" option, and I think I'm missing out on some really great things in life because of it.

Same here.

We once had to shop for new curtains to decorate the new home we bought together. We walked into this giant store with 500 options and I directly walk to a rack and point at my preferred choice. She's puzzled and navigates the store for a full hour only to come back and confirm it to be the most favorable choice, much to her disgust.

At restaurants, I decide in less than a minute, which puts this hilarious time pressure on the other to make a choice. It completely ruins the "fun" ritual of pondering over choices and debating pros and cons with each other.

It's not that I'm some expert fast decision maker, it's pure and raw indifference.

I have another trick. If you don’t know what you want or you want a good and fast answer. Ask someone that have a good knowledge to pick for you.

For instance ask the waiter if he tried the items on the menu and pick the one he likes the best. (And if he didn’t tried most of them because he is new which one is the most popular). If it’s tech go to your best guy about the topic and ask him what you should pick.

It works well if you are good at choosing the right person. And for most not that important things since the person already have more information than you it will be better than flipping a coin.

> Good point. I’ll start reading menus from random locations each time.

Not sure that will do the trick... Imagine a long list with the only two satisfactory items being right next to each other... You'd almost always end up with the first in the list.

Picking a random direction is slightly more robust, but still fails sandwich scenarios... You need to shuffle the menu entirely somehow...

That's only a problem if the difference between the two sandwiches is nontrivial. If I'm satisfied by either option, always going with option A is just fine, IMO.

Good point. I’ll begin requesting a shuffled menu. :)

Note sure what the fix to this “inefficiency” would be. Spend more time making obvious decisions? Use snap judgements on all nonobvious decisions?

Or should the headline be “People Correctly Avoid Spending Too Much Time On Obvious Decisions”?

"Use snap judgements on all nonobvious decisions?"

That's the premise of the article, yes.

Closely related to the "bikeshed" effect (https://blog.codinghorror.com/procrastination-and-the-bikesh...) a.k.a. Parkinson's Law of Triviality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality).

As others have said, this isn't really a paradox. But it's interesting if you continue testing it with more and more trivial decisions. I think you probably reach a pleateau at some point, and actually one the decision reaches a certain point in triviality, decision time may actually decrease. The real factor here is humans' difficulty in quantifying the relative importance of things, especially their own opinions.

Can you give me an example of something that is “really” a paradox?

This isn't a list of paradoxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes

This sentence is false.

"This is Fredkin’s paradox, proposed by the computer scientist Edward Fredkin, whose colleague Marvin Minsky quoted him as follows: “The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them – no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less.”

I read an article simular to this written by Oliver Burkeman a few years back and I was an eye opener for me, from which the above quote comes.

In short, if faced with two choices, the 'difficult' decision is the one where the answer is not clear and if that is the case, then it doesn't really matter so much the decision that you make, because you cannot know ahead of team or both options are equally as good, so most decisions should be easier, because either there is a clear choice, or there isn't but waiting longer to make it simply because it's not clear doesn't make a difference.

Article for reference: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/19/this-co...

I read something similar recently about the difference between "maximising" and "satisficing". It's helpful to have the terms on hand when making an ostensibly tough decision between similar things.

That last paragraph-sentence was very difficult to parse. I think it must be close to 100 words long!

This is only irrational when the outcomes are well-understood to be equally satisfying.

The candy bar exercise is a good example of when it’s irrational.

The problem is that similar-seeming outcomes may be just that: _seemingly_ similar.

The university decision is a bad example of when it’s irrational. The search space is infinite, the variation in possible outcomes is high, and it’s very easy to overlook one or more critical factors.

The skill is then to be able to identify the threshold when all outcomes can be considered well-understood and when time spent deciding costs more than time sooner started.

When things are moving slow and surprises keep popping up, one could be acting irrationally in the way the author describes. When things are moving fast and surprises are minimized, no need to worry about spending too much time decision-making.

I spend eons shopping for things, and it's not a mistake. The trick is, there's a third option: I don't buy most things I want to buy. I have my criteria, and I won't purchase something I don't want. I'll look again in a month or so. This is an incredibly effective way to save money. But, obviously, it doesn't work when you really need something -- then, I try to tally points for and against, and accept that I'll be dissatisfied.

Not buying one of two equally bad choices is the best choice. My strategy for buying when something is really needed (or just really wanted): Do not choose from the similar options. If there's almost equal items at almost the same price, those are usually low-end quality. At the higher end things are usually more distinguishable, and usually more satisfying, too.

I like to flip a coin when the decision is difficult. If the answer is satisfying, then either I had an unarticulated preference or it didn’t matter. If the answer is unsatisfying, then I had an unarticulated preference and I can just choose the (apparently preferable) alternative.

I came across this technique in a Coelho book, maybe The Alchemist, 20 years ago and I liked it. However, I have literally never been in a situation where I had some hidden desire I didn't know that was brought out by a coin flip.

> If the answer is unsatisfying, then I had an unarticulated preference and I can just choose the (apparently preferable) alternative.

Then I discover the alternative is unsatisfying as well. Which causes me to spend time trying to understand why.

JFYI, flipism/flippism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism

> people spent longer choosing between options that were roughly equal in value than between options in which there was a large value disparity.

This seems rational and predictable. It would be wild if people spent more time evaluating decisions between vastly different values. “People spend too much time” on choice paralysis because they’re overwhelmed by too many hard to distinguish things.

No, it's irrational when taking into account the examples given where from the start it's obvious that the choices are "equal enough".

The point is not that it's hard work to distinguish between similar option, the point is that people do it even if its clear it has no benefit from the very start. That's irrational. People even take it so far as to miss out on money straight in front of them, see dot counting experiment.

Amazon used to have something waaaay down on the product page called:

"Most people buy this product after viewing this listing"

They got rid of it, presumably because people started to only buy that item. But man it's hard to chose products now.

Yes, and shopping at Amazon became less worthwhile for it.

One of the mental tricks I do against this effect is that I think of the choice as a repeated one. For example if I’m buying ice-cream and I have to choose 1 flavour out of 5 approximately equal options it is too easy to think that I have to choose the “best” and “most optimal” one. But in reality this is not the one and only time I will eat ice-cream. I can just buy one out of the many desireable ones today, and buy a different one next time.

That way eventually I will eat all the favs, or I will learn some new information and realise that some are actually more or less desireable than I have thought.

I notice this all the time and its very frustrating to me. People fret a great deal over choices where there's many good options. Life is much better if you can recognize these situations and just pick one at random.

I don't think the pick needs to be deliberately random (forsaking any responsibility for the outcome).

You could try to pick the best option quickly based on immediately available/easily discernible information with the acknowledgement that you could be wrong, but it likely won't matter if you are.

While most of the examples in the article fall under "don't waste time on decisions that don't matter", one of them certainly does not: which university to attend. That is where you will live and work for the next 4-5 years. Given two equal status choices I would put a lot of research into the decision. Mainly to try to uncover anything I would strongly dislike - and have to live with - about either choice.

> Even if two choices are equal, one might bring you more luck.

> If two gyms are equidistant from your house and you’re single and looking to meet someone, perhaps it would be wiser to join the gym that is next to a cafe or a grocery store.

If two gyms have nearly equal luck distributed across different categories, one might have more opportunity potential. If both gyms are next to a cafe or grocery store, perhaps it would be wiser to join the gym whose reviews and other online commentary, according to a semantic analysis, suggest people encounter new experiences there.

One also has to appreciate the irony of proposing such a specific and arguably convoluted solution to a problem which seems to be meant as an example of an easy problem that people spend too much time on.

Leslie Lamport wrote about it

Simply put, given a continuous function mononically increasing from 0 to 1, given any degree of discernment X there will be some radius interval Y in which the function is closer than X to 1/2. And people won’t be able to tell for a while what’s better.

If you add random perturbations people will still be sitting there for a while figuring it out, because it could go either way.

Like a pencil which is almost perfectly balanced will take a long time to “figure out” which way to fall.

The interesting thing is that even if you had a timer to go off that said “if you haven’t made a decision by time Z, then choose the first one” there is also a nonzero probability that you won’t be able to tell whether you haven’t made a decision! It is also ambiguous. Read the paper… it took me a while to get it as I corresponded w Leslie about it

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/buridan.pdf

That is a good reference, thank you: "The significance of Buridan’s Principle lies in its warning that decisions may, in rare circumstances, take much longer than expected."

A software project may be late because it spent too much time to choose how to proceed. But it might also be late because it spent no time on choosing the best design to begin with and just chose a very bad design and went with it.

That is why my favorite metaphor for software design is the game of Chess. Every design choice you make may lead to a winning position, or losing position. If you lose you may be able to "play again". But maybe not, because of budgetary constraints.

There's just no Silver Bullet that would make you win in chess every time. But you can win sometimes, and get better at it.

This is like a Sally-Ann problem for scientists.

The Sally-Ann problem is used to test "theory of mind" in autists: the subject watches Sally place a ball in box A and leave the room. Ann enters the room and removes the ball, placing it in box B. Sally returns to the room, looking for her ball. Which box will she open first?

Those supposedly without "theory of mind" will answer box B, because that's where the ball is. The correct answer is box A, because that's where Sally thinks the ball is.

For the scientists, the Kit-Kat and the Mars bar are equivalent, so taking a long time to choose between them is irrational. But what matters is not whether they are equivalent, it's whether they are equivalent to the chooser who must stop and consider their preferences before making a choice.

Oh wow, they really were comparing Kit-Kat & Mars bars as an "economic-value-based food-choice task". If the scientists' criteria was economic, why were subjects asked "which of two food items they would prefer to eat at the end of the experiment"? And then they call this decision "Willingness To Pay", even though the subjects receive the chocolate for free.

Maybe we should just strip this back to actual facts. Scientists observed that subjects in a trial typically spent 250ms longer choosing between a free KitKat & Mars bar (that they may receive after the experiment), than they did on choosing between two groups of random dots on a screen.

I guess only an “autist” like me would miss name switch… and the fact that Sally-Ann is not the same person. >_<

This Pepsi and Coke. I don’t really care the difference, is it cold and is it a Cola? Give it to me

You think guys like Bill Gates think about what they are having for dinner? They don't debate it with their wives. Food just appears. The cook knows what they like and they probably stick to that.

I would consider myself "filthy rich" when food just appeared for me.

Other elites use a trick I call Smurfette's closet: fill your closet with identical copies of a single outfit (much like Smurfette has a closet full of that one dress she wears). That way you won't be paralyzed by picking out what to wear. Barack Obama and Steve Jobs have done this.

It also make laundry more efficient since you can get away with just throwing everything in together.

I have 100 identical socks. Absolutely recommended, not just to avoid the need to choose.

Yes but imagine if they would be bad quality? Then you would have 100 bad quality socks, rather than an even distribution of quality. So some prepurchase trial would be neccessary for me.

I buy 2 pairs of socks or an underwear, use them for a few wears and then buy a fleet.

My tip for this is always: if you are at a point where you really informed yourself of the two things, just throw a coin. If you find yourself hoping for one to win, take that one. If you don't, take the one that wins.

If it were as simple as comparing expected values and randomly choosing one option whenever their confidence intervals overlapped, then hesitation would be irrational. In my experience, though, choices are usually more complicated because you have to think about both expected value and variance (or, more generally, the distribution of returns). If A and B look "about the same" but the error bars are giant, it's usually worth the effort to cut them down a bit. Sometimes you find that the ranges still overlap afterwards, at which point you flip a coin. But just as often, you find that one option is now tightly bounded while the other has a very distinctive risk profile - that is, high upside or high downside. Now you've gained valuable information!

The general problem of making choices with limited information reminds me of a thought experiment from business school: suppose you have a startup that's worth $5B if it succeeds or costs $1B if it fails. You could just try it, and succeed with 50% probability, or you could run a test that tells you for sure whether it will succeed or not. How much should you be willing to spend on that test? The expected value is $2B up front, but $5B if you know it will succeed, and you have a 50% chance that the test comes up positive, for a $2.5B expected value if you can run the test for free. That means you should be willing to spend up to $500M on the test! Hence venture capital.

An old Agile technique I keep in mind is that if it's hard to decide which design is better, that means they're equally good!

So just decide by flipping a coin and move on to productive work!

If it's hard to decide which is better, try them both and find out. Wisdom from Carmack.

Never heard that, but I like it!

Only applicable to certain cases, of course.

Researchers found that people spent longer choosing between options that were roughly equal in value than between options in which there was a large value disparity.

“Value” here means how much participants said they would be willing to pay for each item at the start of the study.

When shown a disfavored food alongside a favored food, people chose fast. When shown a favored food alongside another favored food, people took a while. But this is irrational (at least in the economic sense).

When making decisions, we spend too much time choosing between options with roughly equal utility.

How is this a paradox. I don't get it. Of course, if having to choose between a king-size KitKat vs. kid size Reece's or kid size Snicker's most will choose the KitKat because it's bigger, but otherwise will deliberate longer between the roughly equally-sized candy. Because they are not homogenous except for size. If they were identical, then it would be the same. Food has many other values besides utility, such as taste, which cannot be inspected in the same way size can be.

Going on a tangent here: I wanted to share this article with a friend that doesn't speak English and ran it through Google Translate. It was completely broken with paragraphs in English and others not. I don't remember Google Translate struggling this much with a page. Maybe Substack does crazy HTML things?

Just copy/paste the plain text?

> I am curious whether this works in the opposite direction. Does this also imply that if people take a long time to decide, then the options are roughly equal?

I can disprove the hypothesis above with a counterexample:

Which is the better deal if you're buying gasoline? 500 liters for ¥10000, or 100 US gallons for US$500?

The difference is huge. There's almost a factor of 10 difference in price per unit volume. But you have to spend significant time to figure out which is better. And it's easy to make the problem harder.

So the answer to the OP's question is no; if people take a long time to decide it doesn't necessarily mean that the options are roughly equal.

This paper by Leslie Lamport might be relevant: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/buridan.pdf

Abstract: Buridan’s principle asserts that a discrete decision based upon input having a continuous range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time. It appears to be a fundamental law of nature. Engineers aware of it can design devices so they have an infinitessimal probability of not making a decision quickly enough. Ignorance of the principle could have serious consequences

Lamport just never misses. Spurred by your comment and impressed at seeing Lamport again(!) I went and found this link to all of his published work:

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html

For me, it's more about whether I have missed something in evaluating the options. Sure Barcelona vs Rome is more or less equal, but I don't have the complete information about both of them. I might say it's easier to choose after I visited both, but definitely not before.

It's also about what parts of both the cities I'd enjoy. Overall, they might be the same. But if I like some specific aspect let's say history, Rome is better. If I like diverse cuisines for instance, them Barcelona is better.

Realistically when faced with a choice between going on vacation to Barcelona or Rome, for most people it's going to come down to a question of cost. Are there direct flights? what do they costs? Are there any special deals on? Is there a huge event in one of the places that week driving up hotel prices? Do I want to attend that event? And so on. You won't be able to answer those questions without research, and unless you are properly rich the answer will make a significant difference.

Plus there is always the implicit third option of "stay home and save all that money for something else", which also has to be considered.

"Honey, a lot of these houses are great! We keep getting outbid because we won't put money down fast enough!"

"You just want us me make a decision and get it over with!"

"Yes! Exactly!!!"

it's worse. all of these options are only 80% of what i want. i finally give up and pick one. when it's to late to change i find a better one.

I don’t think I spend too much time on known similar items. But when it comes to choosing over 2-5 essentially equal android phones, vacuum cleaners, pc speakers, etc - I’m paralyzed by fear that marketing has me on its hook. A phone may be ridden with bs apps and crappy defaults. A vacuum cleaner may have a shitty brush lock. Speakers may have too much bass by default.

Just thinking about it raises my anxiety and sense of hopelessness.

There's definitely a taoist idea of seeing decisions as largely unnecessary. You'll end up with the same outcome.

There's even a lived experience in where spending too much time deciding on one option leads to the same outcome anyway.

I've always believed that deciding early allows you to walk and eventually run if you start to experience success in that path.

Abundance of choice is just noise. Having less in life means you can do more.

I learnt the strategy of "satisficing" from Herbert Simons' "Sciences of the Artificial" book. It suggests not bothering to split hairs amongst alternatives once options have met some threshold for acceptance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

I was told (in a CPU architecture lecture) this is a problem in branch prediction too. With two very similar branches, the time taken to decide starts to outweigh the benefits so something has to step in and say "they're obviously basically the same, just choose the first one" (or some other heuristic maybe to about bias, I don't recall).

My technique for simple close decisions is to pick an option at random - flip a coin, random.org, whatever, and then see what my gut reaction is.

If I’m happy, decision made. But if there’s a pang of regret or whatever… that means you actually prefer the alternate so should do that.

Admittedly I’m talking about stuff on the level of “What should I do for lunch” and not, say, career decisions

I dunno, it seems to work equally well for me for larger decisions.

It is usually the larger decisions that are so hard for me and where the coin flip trick is so useful. Lesser decisions do not cause lack of sleep or constant butterflies in my stomach.

Im now contemplating about what to use to heat my new house.

Heat pumps are trendy now, but with power blackouts in EU right now it feels like a really bad idea. Same with pretty much everything else.

So all options are not equally good. They are all equally bad.

I noticed I had a propensity for getting lost in vary similar choices early in life. I decided that in the future, I would just pick the one on the left if the choice was too nuanced. The time is worth more than the margin.

This makes sense; you're training yourself so similar decisions will be easier in the future. The benefit of the 2% better choice over the rest of your life is worth thinking about for longer.

I think about this a lot. That's why when you're in this situation you have to recognize it and timebox.

The blog post could be better written though - it's super choppy.

I would also say that people do not spend enough time on important decisions with widely different outcomes.

I guess the problem is that people don't know what's important.

I flip a coin, and then often find I want to ignore the outcome, in which case I have successfully determined my true preference, so I do.

OMG these are always the hardest. It is much easier to make a significant life-defining choice than to choose a colour of a toothbrush.

I wonder if part of the difficulty lies in choosing which good option to forgo.

How long did it take people to choose between two disfavored options?

"If two gyms are equidistant from your house and you’re single and looking to meet someone"

struck me as pretty creepy.

I used to struggle with this, but now if two options both seem about equally good I will just pick randomly.

AKA The Netflix Paradox

I did my PhD on this topic.

One classic result from biophysics is that, if all of your decisions have a fixed level of difficulty, then what the author suggests is (mathematically) proven to be suboptimal: if a decision feels more difficult, you actually should spend more time on that decision. (Keywords to search for: drift diffusion model[2], sequential probability ratio test[3])

The technical term for what the author is suggesting one should do (not spending so much time on decisions with equal outcomes) is an "urgency signal", or just "urgency" for short. If you are using an urgency signal, then you will spend less time on difficult decisions (i.e. ones with near equal outcomes) than you would without an urgency signal, but still more than you would easy decisions. (For easy decisions, you spend approximately the same amount of time regardless of whether you have an urgency signal.) In the extreme case, for an infinitely strong urgency signal, you will spend equal time on both easy and difficult decisions. (See Paul Cisek's work, e.g., [1].) Conceptually speaking, you need time to detect that the current decision has near-equal outcomes.

It was only recently (mathematically) proven that if you have different levels of difficulty in your decisions, it is optimal to use an urgency signal [4,5]. So since most sequences of decisions aren't all equally difficult (as in the study referenced here), in practice, people will use an urgency signal in decision-making.

Of course, both the desired accuracy and the urgency signal depend on how the decision is being evaluated: if your goal is to make an accurate decision (e.g. buying a house), then you will have a weaker urgency signal and require more evidence before you make a decision. By contrast, if you prioritise decision speed, you will show more urgency signal and require less evidence to make a choice. (The technical term is "speed-accuracy tradeoff".)

Current work suggests that when you are making some decision for the first time, you will not use an urgency signal, but as you become an expert at making those decisions, you will gradually develop an urgency signal [6]. This makes sense conceptually: if you know approximately how hard you can expect these decisions to be, you will recognise the situation where they have approximately the same utility and adjust your strategy accordingly.

[1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/37/11560

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-alternative_forced_choice#...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_probability_ratio_t...

[4] https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2017-16730-001.pdf

[5] https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-017-1340-6

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...

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