The opinion piece You’re Making Decisions Wrong by Mr. Epstein is the author of “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.”
I planned a flight to visit my baby sister in Charlotte. Somehow, I booked a very early flight for my daughter and me, different from the later one my other sister had arrraged for herself, also from ALB.
Once I recognized that I couldn’t change it easily, and stopped beating myself up over it, I leaned into the error. I could have breakfast at the airport with my kid, read a week’s worth of newspapers, et al.
Epstein: “If in making decisions you are often guided by a search for the best, you are going about decision making all wrong — and you’re also probably less happy for it.” There’s a certain librarian brain I have going, in which I must find a quick and dirty way to winnow out the choices.
“In an age of information and choice abundance, we assume we can find the best of everything if we look long and hard enough. Psychologists call that tendency maximizing.” Yes, someone suggested to keep on looking for another option. Don’t wanna! Got other things to do.
“Herbert Simon, a pioneer of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, as well as a Nobel laureate in economics… demonstrated that for most decisions, humans can’t really evaluate the options available — there are too many, our information about them is incomplete and our minds aren’t built to weigh them all — and so we rely on mental shortcuts.”
I live for the shortcut.
When I’m watching the news, I record it and fast forward the “I don’t care” stories, the “I don’t need to know that.” Also, I was out eating lunch with my daughter, and the TV by the bar was showing a discussion about whether some player or coach should have congratulated the opponent when the player or coach’s team was down by 30-something with eight mintes left, I wasn’t watching it, but conversation among the talking heads must have lasted ten minutes. Yet I cannot tell you the teams or people involved.
Simon “coined the term ‘satisficing’ — a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice — to describe how we consider a limited set of options, then choose one that is good enough and move on to live our lives.”
When I’m asked to take on another task, my first reaction to say no. The reason I’ve done a few of those those “Moth” readings at the Madison Theatre on the last Tuesdays of the month is that the benefit of community and self-knowledge is greater than the lost of those two hours.
“Psychologists who followed up on Mr. Simon’s work have shown that his personal philosophy was both efficient and wise. Shortly after Mr. Simon’s death in 2001, a team of researchers created a maximization scale to measure where a person falls on the spectrum between maximizer and satisficer. They found that it’s usually bad to be a maximizer.”
I can find maximizers to be exhausting!
“Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is ‘good enough for me’ rather than ‘the best out there,’ and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make.” Regrets? I’ve had a few but mostly from an unchangable past.
“This is critical today because chronic maximizing has never been easier. In 2006 an economist calculated that the consumer options available to citizens of modern economies exceeded those of preindustrial societies roughly by a factor of 100 million. That is an almost incomprehensible multiplication of choice, and it extends well beyond consumer goods into questions of who to be, how to live, where to work and whom to love.”
There’s an hourlong video, Why Constraints Make You More Creative (Not Freedom) – David Epstein. You could watch it. Or not.