Probability and Consequences

Can you spot a bad choice?

It's easy to tell someone, after seeing their results, that they made the wrong decision. In the USA, this is often called "Monday-morning quarterbacking" due to the prevalence of sports fans saying what "should have been done" in the previous Sunday's football game.

I suppose that sort of social criticism is part of the game for many people. Perhaps that sense of involvement without consequences heightens the enjoyment. The worst that can happen is that your interlocutors might disagree with your pronouncement and you have a lively conversation.

Now compare this with making your own decision before seeing the consequences. What's similar, and what's different? To be honest, I'm having a hard time thinking of anything similar about this situation and the Monday-morning quarterbacking. Perhaps if you think of something, you would share it with me.

Making good choices is hard

Making good choices is hard, yet making choices is central to the lives of humans. We make so many choices that sometimes we don't notice some of them. Sometimes we choose by habit. Sometimes we choose according to some external influence. Sometimes we choose by impulse. And sometimes we try very hard to make the best choice we can given the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Have you ever thought about how you go about making that best choice possible? If you've been reading my newsletters of the past year, you might have noticed that this question has been much on my mind. This has led me down some neuroscience and cognitive psychology paths, as well as stirred up a lot of past thoughts. I still don't have a cohesive mental model of this problem space, and perhaps I never will. It's certainly a large concept to explore, and it seems that humans have not mapped it out concisely in spite of centuries of exploration.

Here's what I'm currently thinking in terms of making good choices.

The quality of a decision is not measured by the outcome from following that decision. I got that from Annie Duke's book, Thinking in Bets. She points out that outcomes are a result of both decision quality and luck. If the cards don't fall your way, you're not going to win the hand no matter how well you play it. But if you don't play it well, you're going to lose a greater percentage of hands than you otherwise would.

Probability of Success.

Given what you know at the time, what are the chances of success of the various choices available to you? If your choice has a low probability of succeeding, it might be worth questioning the wisdom of that choice. How do you even judge that probability? In poker, you can calculate the odds of particular outcomes due to the finite collection of cards in a deck. In the larger world, it's harder to judge, and most people aren't very good at guessing probability.

Risk of Failure.

The flip side of Success, is Failure. A calculation of a binary outcome would calculate the probability of failure as (100% - the probability of success), but there might be neutral outcomes, also, that don't count as either failure or success. And risk includes more than the probability of a negative outcome, but also the consequences. In Russian Roulette, with 6 chambers and one bullet, the odds of failure is less than 17%, but the consequences are eternal. Under what circumstances would you consider playing to be a quality decision?

What do success and failure mean?

As we considered the risk, we noted that in most of life, success and failure are not boolean values. You might start out thinking of a spectrum that ranges from "tremendous success" at one end to "dismal failure" at the other.

Then it's worth considering "success for whom?" and "failure for whom." We are all connected with each other through the greater society of which we are part. Damaging part of that society eventually comes around to affect us, personally. We may not notice the damage because it only slightly affects us personally. We may not notice the connection between our decisions and the effects on us by the hugely complex system we call society.

Again, we can only approximate the consequences transmitted through our social systems. The good news is that our nervous systems are pretty adept and dealing with imperfect information and approximations. That's what they've evolved to do given the relatively simple mechanisms they have available. The bad news is that they have a high error rate at doing so accurately, especially in the highly complex contexts we find ourselves in today. These are systems that evolved trying to eat other animals rather than the other way around.

There's more, but these are the top items that come to mind for me today. I admit that my understanding of good decision-making is most certainly incomplete. I don't even know if everything I know about making good decisions is true. I find that all the more reason to share my thinking with you, and ask you to share yours with me.

P.S. Making good decisions is hard work. It requires not accepting your first inclinations, and considering ideas that may not have occurred to you. Annie Duke recommends a "buddy system" or a "decision group" to make it easier. I'm considering exploring such, to see how it works. If you're interested, or think you might be interested, let me know. You could schedule a Zoom Session with me to talk about it.

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