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Practicing Rational Decisions

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lesswrong.com 3rd Jan. 2012

“Thinking and deciding are central to our daily lives. The Less Wrong community aims to gain expertise in how human brains think and decide, so that we can do so more successfully. We use the latest insights from cognitive science, social psychology, probability theory, and decision theory to improve our understanding of how the world works and what we can do to achieve our goals.”

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Decisions as we see them

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Be pragmatic, be mechanical

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What’s a good decision?

Removes uncertainty and doubt.

⇒ Clear mind.

Motivates you to proceed with implementation / acting on it.

⇒ Successful action.

Avoids risks for later surprise and regret.

⇒ Gives confidence and calm.

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Two obstacles of rational decisions

Irrationality:

Heuristics and Biases
Emotional Shortcuts / Defensiveness

Quality of a decision?!

Focus on Process

- good decision is not as easy to recognize as a solution to a problem (sometimes even hard to recognize in hindsight; when uncertainty is involved, ex: insurance)

- irrationality creeps in: heuristics and biases, many of them, in many different forms!

first rule: focus on the process, use an appropriate level of the ladder.

Sloan example for a trigger

cup of coffee or time-box for decision-making (or multiple time-boxes for different parts) to get the process started. → also free your mind from the decision while you’re not working on it.

there is no magic formula for taking a rational decision! the only way is to balance out all the biases. take all the viewpoints. especially for your various future selves. therefore, most of the material is sociological in nature. the final calculation is trivial. the hard work is to make sure that the input numbers are relevant and comprehensive.

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When to be rational?

big money/numbers - small money - fun - love

Money and numbers in general easily trigger our rationality reflex. When uncertainty is supplemented with statistical information this triggers probabilistic thinking which again triggers rationality. Numbers-Rationality bias!

Give the non-numeric arguments a voice! Not just price-vs-quality, but list and quantify the relevant qualities!

Small decisions mostly taken out of habit. We can’t invest a long thinking process for every small decisions, but if we do it from time to time, then our habits might change, which in turn can have a huge effect overall!

Love and passion: just “going with the feeling” will be biased towards one thing or another. maybe biased towards looks. maybe biased to have easy access to sex for now. maybe biased to convenience of being in the same gang, having similar courses, etc. RECENCY BIAS. It’s harder to rationalize love than it is to rationalize other things, but it is still beneficial. It’s a way to take another look, a more comprehensive look, a more balanced (instead of biased) look. Rationality is not the most important skill in love, but it is useful anyways!

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The three steps

Triggering Rationality
Creative Problem Structuring
Evaluation

Values
Alternatives
Ratings

Triggering Rationality: Recognize that there is something to decide. Schedule a time for making a rational decision and don’t worry about it until then. If it’s a small decision, take two to five minutes to run the rational decision process right on the spot.

Kreativität ist äußerst wichtig, um Aspekte der Entscheidung zu finden, die man sonst eigentlich übersehen würde! Man denke an eine größere Anschaffung: man vergleicht Preis und Leistung und entscheidet sich und stellt dann fest, dass ein bestimmter nicht so häufiger, aber sehr wichtiger Anwendungsfall nicht vom gekauften Produkt abgedeckt wird! (Bsp: Handynummer funktioniert im Ausland nicht.)

Advice might sound “soft” and not based on clear logic -- that’s because we’re fighting irrationality which is not based on clear logic either. We could spend our time talking about how evolution caused humans to adopt various irrational behaviors and that would be nice story-telling thus trigger our meme-making genes…

But if we want to pursue goals instead of just spreading good vibes, then we have to learn the actual antidotes to irrationality. Those antidotes have been empirically confirmed to work and we just exploit them without thinking about them in terms of interesting stories.

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Warning signs of irrationality

shifting responsibility,
procrastinating,
seeking social support for beliefs,
avoiding falsifiability,
actively seeking ideas that strengthen your position or avoiding those that weaken it,
reacting with excessive emotionality when challenged.

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Trust the process

Would I be willing to commit to and actually follow

through on whichever of the alternatives the analysis

indicates is the best?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7se/what_if_we_make_better_decisions_when_we_trust/

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Exercise One

Is there any decision that you’ve taken intuitively/instinctively in the past and that you now think could have benefitted from a more rational analysis?

Any such decision coming up in your life?

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Creativity Techniques

Stimulus Variation
Force Fit
Mood
Observation
Creative Conversation
Breaks and Priming
Checklists

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Observation

One study (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976) presented art students with objects they might include in a still life and then observed their behavior. The principal finding was that those who explored these objects the most thoroughly and took the longest to decide on a composition and treatment produced the best paintings and had the most successful careers as artists. The best artists were more likely to walk around the table on which the objects had been placed, to pick them up and handle them—even to bite on them!

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Creative Conversations

Devil’s advocate
fighting Giants
Networking

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Rationality = Balance

Controlled Processes / Habits
External Memory
Decomposition
Priming / Environment
Number fallacies

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Value sets / Decision criteria

Complete / Comprehensive
Relevant / Meaningful
Testable / Measureable
Independent / Non-Redundant

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Values - Criteria- Means

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Personal Values - Who am I?

Not who I want to be - but I am.
Not the role that I play.
Not the stereotype I belong to.
Not the life I am currently living.
Not homo sapiens psychologicus.

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Exercise Two: Your Values

Imagine a really busy weekend.

Imagine a friend is in town just that weekend and you want to spend time with him or her. You need to decide how to reshuffle and reprioritize your activities.

For this exercise, focus on your values which drive this decision and thus beget criteria for evaluating alternatives.

Write your results in the form of a values / criteria tree.

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Exercise Instructions

force-fit everything
take the viewpoint of an outside advisor (force-fit your advice!)
timebox things

five items for a list
two to three childs in a tree node

be mechanical
create legible artifacts

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Quantification with creativity

How often will I see my son?

… number of days per year?
… number of days between visits?

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Alternatives

“The most satisfactory resolutions of decision problems are achieved by the creation of win-win alternatives, which require no value tradeoffs.”

Generate-and-Test !

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Generating Alternatives

from Values

from other Alternatives

from relevant Causes

from Resources

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Exercise: Devil’s Advocate

Choose one of the following questions:

should I smoke or not?
should I be rational or just go with the flow?

Now, use your previously stated values to argue convincingly and realistically that you should smoke, or (if you chose the other question) argue to just go with the flow.

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Exc: Decisions out of thin air

What do you want to do on the last week-end of January?

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More to come!

Decision tables

Uncertainty

In-depth practice