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When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

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Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#51

Post by Throwaway823 »

userbinator wrote: post #48
Throwaway823 wrote: post #17

There are a couple of popular TED talks about choice. http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch... It's something to keep in mind with your development work as well. Let's say you create an application to minify javascript. Your app has an input field, and a button that says 'Go', and that's it. Very simple, no confusion, people love it. However, you notice 5% of people don't use the app, because t…

Personally, while the research is interesting, I think it's also being far too overused as justification to remove/not add options. The common counterargument of "just use another product that does have the option you want" often turns out to be as fruitless - that other product may not have some option you want (that this one does), due to the same reasoning! I also fundamentally disagree that removing choices is a…

There is balance but it's not easy to find.

If I visit a restaurant, and they only serve chicken, that's kind of limited. Now, they give me the option of beef or chicken. Ok, this is a decision I can make, and be confident in selecting. Now, what happens if they ask whether I would like northwestern chicken, southern chicken, grain fed chicken, or korean chicken? Huh? I'm not a master of chicken, just give me the best one.

We hit a point where I no longer have a strong opinion, and this is where my confidence drops, and I start to question myself. This means they've given me too much choice.

This isn't the same for everyone, someone out there knows their chicken inside and out, and they have a preference for one specific type. If you want to cater your restaurant towards those people then give them that choice. However, you'll be scaring away the average person at the same time.

For the same reason it's difficult to make an application for casual and advanced users. Pick your audience, and that'll give you some guidance on the appropriate amount of choice to include.

Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#52

Post by Fargren »

lotharbot wrote: post #22
paulsutter wrote: post #10

When faced with a difficult decision, it probably doesn't matter which choice you take. Emotionally it's difficult to accept this. But logically it's easy: - If one of the two choices was clearly better, it would be an easy decision - But it is difficult. Therefore, neither of the two choices is clearly better. - Therefore, it doesn't matter much which you choose. This doesn't work for people who feel irrational regr…

> "neither of the two choices is clearly better" "Clarity" is dependent on what level of information you already have and what analysis you've already done. In some circumstances, you've already done whatever investigation, research, and thinking can reasonably be done. If the choice is still hard, then the choice is likely to be of similar value either way and you may as well choose arbitrarily. But in other circums…

If the research has a cost (and you know this cost), then you actually have three options: original option A, original option B, and research + correct option (or knowledge that both options are the same). If you can at least bound the costs of options A and B, you can make a pretty good guess as to whether the research is worth doing. If it's not, then choosing at random is the optimal choice, and you should not regret it.

Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#53

Post by discipline »

Throwaway823 wrote: post #49
saurik wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the end, maybe the 95% are feeling so uneasy, 10% of them leave to another app, that just has a 'Go' button again, so they feel confident, and more happy. You can't knowingly hide from choice: the existence of a different application that only has the Go button is not an escape, it is just yet another choice. The exact same story you described within the microcosm of the single application now plays out between…

About your first point, I don't think that's true. For example, I visit the store to buy toothpaste. I might see 25 different kinds of Colgate, and 1 kind of Crest. Personally, I'd likely buy the Crest, because I can't decide between all the Colgate options of Ultrabrite, Optic White, Sparkling White, Sensitive, Sensitive Pro-Relief, Max Fresh, 2in1, Cavity Protection, Total, Total Advanced, Total Action, and Triple…

To my untrained ear, this sounds like an argument over optimal versus satisficing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing). (I'm just tossing that out there: if this is something you already know about, just ignore my comment. I'll let myself out now...)

Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#54

Post by judk »

mdda wrote: post #41
isomorphic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

paulsutter gave a good answer to this elsewhere in the comments. But I would add this: All other things being equal (or roughly equal), pick one at random. Sure, there's opportunity cost, but there are also costs way beyond the time you take fretting over a decision. You said it yourself: You're "crippled" by anxiety. How is that better than making a random decision? Or just going with your gut?

Another benefit of flipping a coin is that if, after the choice is made (e.g. the coin comes up heads), you instinctively regret it not having been tails : then you know what you wanted in your heart. Since your brain had no better answer than to flip a coin, then this is a quick and rationalizable way to see what your heart feels.

That's, not finding your true desire, though, that's just triggering the regret reaction.

Flipping a coin is a way to think about the "what if I choose option B" in a way that feels like someone else made the decision so it's OK to resist it, instead of feeling like you made the descision yourself and get stuck in consistency bias (stubbornness).

Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#55

Post by judk »

scotty79 wrote: post #34

> The choices between those objects that they valued most highly were both the most positive and the most anxiety-filled. The more choices they had—the study was repeated with up to six items per choice—the more anxious they felt. This sounds like nothing more than loss aversion. Until you make the choice you have opportunity to acquire some valuable things. When you make the choice you've lost all the things you did…

Sadly this is the sort of rationalizing that uunderlies racism/tribalism: hating people who are different feels better than feeling left out of their goodness.

Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#56

Post by alexvr »

I spent months of my freshman year highly anxious for similar first-world reasons. I excel at and enjoy lots of things and felt like school was making me commit to one field. I would spend days very inactive, stressing out about, for example, the pros and cons of being a game programmer versus an embedded software engineer or something. I could never seem to settle on one area. I thought game programming was a waste of engineering talent, but I found everything else about it extremely appealing. Luckily I'm over that crap now, as I accept what I knew all along: that it's not what you major in that defines you. It's what you do in life that matters. It also helps to be in a field that applies to virtually everything else (CS). I'd go even more crazy if I were in some highly specialized field. Strangely, I'd say the best cure for this is a brief existential crisis.

Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#57

Post by jodrellblank »

userbinator wrote: post #48
Throwaway823 wrote: post #17

There are a couple of popular TED talks about choice. http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch... It's something to keep in mind with your development work as well. Let's say you create an application to minify javascript. Your app has an input field, and a button that says 'Go', and that's it. Very simple, no confusion, people love it. However, you notice 5% of people don't use the app, because t…

Personally, while the research is interesting, I think it's also being far too overused as justification to remove/not add options. The common counterargument of "just use another product that does have the option you want" often turns out to be as fruitless - that other product may not have some option you want (that this one does), due to the same reasoning! I also fundamentally disagree that removing choices is a…

I most definitely do not want to have nearly every decision in my life made by someone else, and find the anxiety/difficulty of the process to be absolutely normal.

Approximately every decision that's ever been made and affects you was made by someone else.

From toothpaste formulation to water cleanliness approval standards to mains electric plug standards to zoning regulations, pavement width, tram or train schedules, volumes of alcohol that can be sold, material books are printed on, blend of spices in KFC batter or how long a film is, what goes in an ethernet frame fields, how radio frequencies are licensed, where keyboard input goes through the Mac OS kernel, why your local shops stock X instead of Y...

You don't want the decisions you care about made by other people - who would?

But if you say you want to make nearly every decision that gets made in your life? I don't believe you could, or would want to, if faced with what that really meant.

I don't wan't to decide my own custom HN colour scheme and font size and font face and text colour contrast with background colour and font sub-pixel hinting style and text box resize behaviour interacting with a high-DPI rendered display, and whether the page POST has headers announcing this or that. The defaults chosen by Google Chrome team, Microsoft Windows team and HN designers are all fine.

Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#58

Post by jasonwocky »

userbinator wrote: post #48
Throwaway823 wrote: post #17

There are a couple of popular TED talks about choice. http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch... It's something to keep in mind with your development work as well. Let's say you create an application to minify javascript. Your app has an input field, and a button that says 'Go', and that's it. Very simple, no confusion, people love it. However, you notice 5% of people don't use the app, because t…

Personally, while the research is interesting, I think it's also being far too overused as justification to remove/not add options. The common counterargument of "just use another product that does have the option you want" often turns out to be as fruitless - that other product may not have some option you want (that this one does), due to the same reasoning! I also fundamentally disagree that removing choices is a…

> I also fundamentally disagree that removing choices is a good thing - the research says it makes (most?) people feel better, which suggests that they don't want to think about making any choices because it is somehow difficult for them and causes anxiety. Logically, this means they would be most satisfied and happy if they didn't have to make any choices or do any thinking at all, and something/someone else made all the decisions for them - the equivalent of having no freedom or control over one's life.

You're equivocating removing choices that one ultimately wouldn't make any way (i.e. "false choices") with removing all choice.

> Is this really what we want society to become?

Also slippery-sloping.

Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#59

Post by colanderman »

Throwaway823 wrote: post #17

There are a couple of popular TED talks about choice. http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch... It's something to keep in mind with your development work as well. Let's say you create an application to minify javascript. Your app has an input field, and a button that says 'Go', and that's it. Very simple, no confusion, people love it. However, you notice 5% of people don't use the app, because t…

I think Doodle handles this well; it provides a single clear path for its 90% use case, and hides extra options in dropdowns that clearly designate those options as "abnormal", but nonetheless acceptable.

Re: When It's Bad to Have Good Choices

#60

Post by kylec »

Throwaway823 wrote: post #17

There are a couple of popular TED talks about choice. http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch... It's something to keep in mind with your development work as well. Let's say you create an application to minify javascript. Your app has an input field, and a button that says 'Go', and that's it. Very simple, no confusion, people love it. However, you notice 5% of people don't use the app, because t…

I don't know if a single choice would throw many people off, but there's certainly software out there where there's a thriving ecosystem built on top of it to reduce its complexity and number of choices. Ffmpeg comes to mind. I've never used it directly, but I've used several apps that wrap over it and provide the user a constrained list of options that are presumably optimized for different scenarios. I then don't have to worry about selecting a set of bad options and wasting time creating and disk space storing bad conversions.
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