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This deserves the king of making decisions: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/marriage-decision.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also another variant of coin-flipping: if you're agonizing over choice between option A and option B, it means that their costs and benefits roughly cancel out - so you're wasting time deliberating, and may as well toss a coin and be done with it.
Kind of like Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Many think it's about how he made a bold decision that "made all the difference," but it's really about how it didn't matter which road he took. Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same
The poem is saying two things:
1. The line you quoted: Even though one of the paths looks special, in fact both are well-trodden paths. The walker is making a decision on imaginary evidence. The poem is mocking the poor decision-making process and retroactive rationalization.
2. (granted, not in the text, but in the context). The poem is about Frost's friend Thomas having trouble deciding deciding whether to volunteer to fight in WWI. Thomas died in the war.
"The road [supposedly] not taken" did make all the difference, but in a negative way. The walker should have used the rigorous method the article proposes.
http://www.historybyzim.com/2014/08/robert-frosts-the-road-n...
I don’t think there will ever be a way to make a “big decision” with thorough analysis that will make you certain you made the right choice. There are too many variables to ever know for sure the “right” choice
"In July 1838, Charles Darwin, then 29, sat down to make a decision that would alter the course of his life [...] Should he get married?" Incidentally, Kierkegaard kinda tried to answer this question 5 years later in Either/Or. A couple of related snippets: "I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do…
That's an excellent quote, thank you. Having said that, my take on that quote is that it seems a bit of a cop out - a way of absolving oneself of the consequences of ones actions. You may well regret both, but perhaps you will also enjoy one, or you will regret one less, or regret one more, or one has ramifications which due to your (hypothetical) selfish nature you may regret but are better for society, etc etc etc.…
"Adding your own breth to the winds of fate" is adding 0 to 0.
The Freakonomics guys did a paper on this. Basically, their conclusion was just do it, make the big change. Their experiment was based on coin flips and self-reported happiness, but basically those who made the big change after the coin told them to reported being substantially happier, and if you dive into the data, you'll see that those that went with the biggest decisions (quit a job, get married) saw a double dig…
Is this just confirming that status quo bias exists?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that really your takeaway from the paper? It depends on what the change is. Look more closely at the sixth column of Table 3 in your linked paper. If the question is "Should I get engaged?" or "Should I have kids?", the facts are in, and the answer is no. You can't just say a blanket statement that all change is to the good.
With standard errors much larger than the estimate, I.e. indistinguishable from zero.
It takes years to measure the quality of a parenthood or a marriage.
Alan Watts: “You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups. And people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration? And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite. So what you do is, you go through the m…
I know people here aren't big on religion, but just as a perspective (no worse than Jeff Bezos I guess): In Islam there is a certain prayer you are supposed to say before making a big decision. You ask God's guidance for it, that you'll do what's good for you in this life and the next, and so on. The funny thing is that when you do that, you almost always make up your mind immediately. It's like deep down you already…
It's funny how these tricks really do work, where you can skip the deliberation and go right to the decision you've already subconsciously made. Another similar one is to flip a coin and see if you're disappointed in the outcome or not (or alternatively, think about which coin outcome you're hoping for before you look at the result).
#ThingsEnderWigginKnew For those who never read "Ender's Game", the main character must play an unwinnable game where he is given 2 choices where both decisions end in death. He manages to find a hidden third option (killing the Giant) that allows him to continue playing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes the coin thing is really good. If you want to flip again, then you know what option you prefer.
I have written a bit about this matter, from the point of view of using I-Ching as your "decision support tool"... https://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html