People spend too much time on decisions with equally satisfying outcomes

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

struck me as pretty creepy.

"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!

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.

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