Why Don't We Make Wise Decisions?

It's Straightforward, but Rarely Done

One of the most important tasks in our lives:

Evaluate possible actions in order to see if we should do them

This task is frequently trivial and requires no thought. “Yes, I’ll go pee now instead of later”. But on other occasions the consequences are of enormous importance and differ wildly depending on what we end up doing. It’s almost shocking, at least to me, how badly we go about making these decisions. We can do much, much better—and it’s not difficult to figure out the way forward.

For example, consider some of the big decisions that many of us face today.

• What should I do about the AI-driven job market?

• Should I get a normal job or work remotely? If the latter, I can live anywhere. So, where should I live?

• Should I live in low-cost countries, make little money because I don’t need it, and travel and meet a lot of people from all over the world?

• How I am going to deal with my student loans?

• Should I move in with my partner? If so, should we combine our finances?

• Should I start investing money, even if it’s just a tiny bit?

• I’m pregnant. Should I have the baby and keep it, have it and put it up for adoption, or have an abortion?

• I got her pregnant. What do I do now?

• My parents/spouse really want me to do X, but I don’t want to. What do I do now?

• How much time should I devote to political activism? Or my hobbies?

• Should I date with the goal of finding a serious, long-term relationship? Or just casually? Or maybe just focus on my studies and career development for the next year or so?

• I suck at getting enough sleep, nutrition, and exercise. How should I handle this?

Needless to say, the list can be expanded greatly. Let’s look at a particular big decision.

Sara’s Predicament. Sara is 39 years old, walks with a slight limp, is recently fired, has little money-making skills, and is in debt. She lives in a lousy apartment. She is heterosexual and almost all men find her unattractive. She also has chronic dental pain that the doctors simply cannot treat. She’s been divorced twice. She dropped out of college after one year. She has PTSD from the divorces.

She has been dating Abdul for months and she knows he’s going to propose marriage soon. She hates being single. But marrying Abdul sucks too, since he’s kind of a shitty person to have as a husband.

Sara’s wondering whether she should marry him. No other man has been interested in her for over a decade. As far as she can tell, Abdul is her last chance at marriage. Her situation looks pretty grim.

As Sara sees things (which might not be accurate; see below), her options are two.

• MARRY: Marry Abdul

• ALONE: Stay single & alone

When asking her friends for advice, she gets highly typical responses.

Friend 1: lists pros of MARRY.

“He’s got a nice house, good job, and you say he’s great at sex!”

Friend 2: lists cons of MARRY.

“He’s got a bad anger problem. He slapped you hard, on two occasions. And he’s kind of an asshole sometimes, to lots of people”.

Friend 3: lists pros of ALONE.

“Staying single means keeping your freedom to do what you like. You also get to keep living downtown instead of the suburbs where he lives. You’ve always preferred city living as well as your independence”.

Friend 4: lists cons of ALONE.

“You keep saying how lonely you are without a man. And your income is never more than just barely enough to pay for your shitty apartment”.

Friend 5: lists pros & cons of MARRY.

“The cons definitely outweigh the pros. So, you shouldn’t marry him”.

Friend 6: lists pros & cons of ALONE.

“The cons definitely outweigh the pros. So, you should marry him”.

Anyone with life experience knows that these are highly realistic bits of feedback from friends. It doesn’t take a genius to see how incomplete the bits of advice are. Furthermore, the last two friends, who actually were more thorough than the first four, have quite reasonably come to opposite conclusions. Even if all six friends have spoken nothing but facts, things aren’t going well for Sara’s decision-making process.

Friend 7: lists pros & cons of MARRY & ALONE and then compares them.

This friend is really thorough. She’s probably Sara’s best friend. She goes over all the pros and cons of both options MARRY and ALONE and then tries to see how they compare. Both friends 5 and 6 were half right: the cons definitely outweigh the pros, for each of MARRY and ALONE. It’s friend 7 who realizes that MARRY, for instance, is even worse than ALONE, despite the fact that MARRY’s cons outweigh MARRY’s pros.

But friend 7, for all her insight and generous use of her time, might be missing something:

Friend 8: points out the alternative option COMMUNE.

“Why not live in one of those close-knit communes? The ones where everyone there is like one big family, taking turns caring for all the kids and pets and all that. They aren’t like roommates. They’re more like real families. I’m not sure about the sexual rules, but who knows? Maybe it would work out for you. You love having lots of close friends, so maybe this is a good option for you”.

The best way for Sara to make her life-changing decision is pretty straightforward:

SOLUTION: think of the most realistic options; figure out pros & cons of each; compare the results; choose the option with the best outcome

As we’ve seen, there are four key mistakes one can make when faced with an important decision:

• Mistake 1: focus on just the pros

• Mistake 2: focus on just the cons

• Mistake 3: focus on the pros and cons of individual options but make no comparison of the results

• Mistake 4: neglect to see that there are more options available

In my experience, absolutely everyone makes one or more of those mistakes when faced with vitally important decisions, such as choosing a career, a marriage, whether to have kids or how many to have, where to live, and so on. I don’t think my experience has been unrepresentative in that respect. Hell, I know full well that I have made those mistakes over and over again, although they have decreased a great deal over the last few years.

I don’t want to give the impression that following SOLUTION is always easy. On the contrary, it usually isn’t, for two reasons.

• Trying to find the main pros and cons isn’t that easy, although with the advent of AI tools it’s a lot easier now.

• But even when you have listed many of the most central pros and cons, weighing them against each other is usually impossible to do fully, since you don’t know how relatively valuable the pros and cons are for you.

However, whatever work you do when carrying out that task can be illuminating and helpful for making your big decision. We’re looking to do things with more wisdom, not perfect wisdom.

In many real-life situations, it can require some pretty inspired brainstorming to avoid mistake 4.

Jake’s Difficult Decision. Jake’s girlfriend works in a biomedical lab. It’s her dream job. Today she learns that all the funding for the lab’s research has been cancelled, and she and her coworkers are all fired. She really needs Jake’s emotional support, right now.

But Jake has an interview for a fantastic job in two hours. He needs to leave their apartment now in order to drive there. He knows that there’s an excellent chance he’ll get the job if he goes. He also knows that he won’t get the job if he stays home with his girlfriend.

As Jake sees things, he has two options:

1: Go to interview, abandoning girlfriend in her time of need

2: Stay & support girlfriend, lose job opportunity

But if he keeps his wits about him and takes the time to think systematically and creatively, then he can discover that there’s a third option worth considering:

3: Take her with him on the drive to and from the interview

Option 3 isn’t perfect, for either Jake or his girlfriend, but how often do we have perfect options when faced with a big decision?

Instances of mistakes 2 and 3 are common.

The Leiter Report. Around twenty years ago the philosopher Brian Leiter started a project meant to rank the research quality of philosophy departments in several countries. The main purpose of this exercise was to give good advice for students who were thinking of going to graduate school to study philosophy. Over the years, the project grew considerably, to the point that well over a hundred philosophers helped compile the ranking. But the other thing that grew were the criticisms of the rankings. Many philosophers pointed out various alleged weaknesses of the entire project. They often tried to boycott the results, thinking that they were too flawed for anyone to rely on, including prospective graduate students.

I remember arguing about the merits of the Leiter Report with a colleague of mine. He would articulate criticism after criticism. I agreed with some but not all of those alleged weaknesses. But I insisted to him that he was making a fundamental error. The entire point of the Report is to come up with a better way for prospective graduate students and other interested parties to evaluate the research quality of various philosophy departments. My colleague was fixated on a pro/con analysis of the Report, weighing the pros and cons. If we delete the “fixated on” part, then that’s a valuable start. But when it comes to whether anyone should rely on the Report, the relevant question is this: is there a better way for these people to evaluate the research quality of various graduate programs?

Leiter and those who worked with him were aware of the faults of the Report, or at least some of them. Their reason for continuing to produce (and improve) the Report was that all the alternatives suck in comparison. The alternatives that were actually available to prospective students were things such as asking one, two, or three professors, or trying to judge research quality from an amateur standpoint. Those alternatives were obviously much less reliable than using the Leiter Report. I told my colleague that even if he was right about all the alleged flaws in the Report—so the pros are outweighed by the cons, considered in isolation--the Report would still be worth relying on, since it was so much better than any of the alternatives. Unfortunately, the Report wasn’t flattering for the types of philosophy he respected, so he couldn’t handle the discussion in a rational way. Don’t laugh: we all do this from time to time.

There are many applications of this lesson, including those that are probably closer to home. For instance, anyone with power in a large business knows that when faced with a new opportunity, it’s insufficient to merely look at a detailed list of pros and cons of the opportunity. He or she needs to look at the pros and cons of not taking the opportunity as well, and then make comparisons.

Eggs & Nutrition. If you are serious about exercise, then you know the extreme importance of nutrition. I like to lift weights, but I have zero chance at getting significantly stronger or putting on muscle mass if I don’t eat right. Many apparent experts on weight training and/or nutrition insist that eggs are a great part of a diet for an amateur weightlifter. But other apparent experts say the reverse, recommending I stay away from all dairy like it’s the plague. Well . . . what the hell am I supposed to do?

I’m not going to give you my opinion on the answer to the question just articulated, since it makes no difference here. But in this case it’s important to do both a pros/cons evaluation and a comparative evaluation. For the latter, you take the results from the pros/cons evaluation and then evaluate the alternatives there are to eating eggs. Eggs are high in protein, which is essential for weight training. They also are loaded with other nutritional benefits. And they have cons as well, as indicated by their detractors. But how do eggs, with those pros and cons, stand up when compared to other things I might eat, such as salmon or lots of beans? We need both kinds of evaluation in order to make a wise decision.

I realize that many readers will say that when it comes to many decisions in life, whether personal or professional, the idea of a cold, sober comparative analysis seems unwise. It’s tempting to let one’s emotions dictate what to do—and it seems wise to do so. The Sara’s Predicament story might seem like such a case.

Well, I disagree. It’s true that one has to take into account emotions when doing a comparative evaluation. There is nothing “cold, sober” about it. But it’s much wiser to attempt the evaluation than to not do it. I close with two provocative examples.

Deciding to Have Kids. A close friend of mine will probably get married soon. She and her husband will face the choice: have kids or not?

For many people, like my friend Melanie from Minneapolis, the answer is perfectly obvious: Yes. For others such as my uncle Bruce, who put an extreme value on freedom and independence in what he did with his day-to-day life, the answer is obvious: No. My friend is probably somewhere in the middle of those extremes. She could live a wonderful life child-free, as indeed she already has. She could also live a wonderful life as a parent. Of all people, she would be best served by doing a comparative evaluation. Although it’s easy to say “It doesn’t matter, as either choice can be fantastic”—which is true—it’s also easy to think that one choice might be much better than the other. Since the decision has colossal consequences, it shouldn’t be made with only sentimentality and other emotions.

Who Makes the Decisions in this Relationship? For many couples today, at least in my social circles, big decisions are made jointly, and the two people have about an equal say in the matter. Where to live, whether to get married, whether an elderly parent comes to live in their home, how to raise the kids, where to invest money, and so on. It isn’t always equal but usually it’s pretty close (e.g., if one person cares a great deal about the aesthetics of the home while the other is indifferent, then the first’s opinion about redoing the bathroom might count more). Long ago, the male in a male/female relationship made the big decisions and the female had to go along. He was the dom; she was the sub (in a non-sexual sense). With all that in mind, what’s best: joint decisions or sole-authored ones?

I know that many of my friends would go nuts with advocating “It should be joint!!” I understand that side of the story, since I used to embrace it without much consideration, as it seemed clear. But there are a couple vital considerations here.

The first should be obvious: in some relationships, when it comes to decision making one person is naturally more dominant and the other is naturally more submissive. This has nothing to do with sexual organs. A sole-authored practice will suit their psychology best.

The second is relevant to this post. It’s easy to list cons of sole-authored decision making. For instance, the sub who gets overruled without extensive discussion won’t feel heard, won’t feel respected, will end up resentful, and so on. It’s a significant point. But pros and cons are insufficient here. After all, there are pros and cons for the joint practice too. For example, many decisions result in a real conflict, and if both parties have a roughly equal say, then discussion can go on so long that hurtful things are said or done—things that wouldn’t have happened in the sole-authored practice. The lesson: don’t rest with pros and cons; do a comparative evaluation.