Swimming in the delicious upstream of marbled fat.
Monday, December 19, 2011
To Trust One's Instincts
The title should be, "To trust one's instincts and just live." The question is how much we should think about, or analyze, before we take action, or conclude about descriptive facts.
The answer is: perhaps less than I've previously thought.
That's a bit of an oversimplification, don't you think? After all, lots of people have instincts that tell them sunk costs should be taken into account when making decisions, or that if a fair coin comes up tails four times in a row then the next toss is more likely to be heads than tails. I could go on and enumerate hundreds of strong instincts that make for very bad decision rules.
I see your post as applicable to those situations when we're analyzing and dissecting all kinds of information in order to make a decision, cheerfully ignoring the fact that the amount of information available for us to analyze is way too small to matter, so that two weeks of heavy thinking can't make our decision any better than one that could be reached via coin flip in two seconds flat.
That's a bit of an oversimplification, don't you think? After all, lots of people have instincts that tell them sunk costs should be taken into account when making decisions, or that if a fair coin comes up tails four times in a row then the next toss is more likely to be heads than tails. I could go on and enumerate hundreds of strong instincts that make for very bad decision rules.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I have to refine it. I'll work on it.
ReplyDeleteI see your post as applicable to those situations when we're analyzing and dissecting all kinds of information in order to make a decision, cheerfully ignoring the fact that the amount of information available for us to analyze is way too small to matter, so that two weeks of heavy thinking can't make our decision any better than one that could be reached via coin flip in two seconds flat.
ReplyDelete