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?
People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes
121–129 of 129 posts
Re: People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes
#122An 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.
Re: People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes
#123I 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 conside…
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.
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.
Re: People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes
#124Which 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.
So what would you say then is “the Costco of programming languages”?
Re: People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
Re: People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes
#126Closely 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 re…
Can you give me an example of something that is “really” a paradox?
This sentence is false.
Re: People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes
#127This 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 qu…
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:
Re: People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 discus…
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.
Re: People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes
#129Closely 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 re…
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