> [!meta]- Document Info > **Author**: [[drmaciver.substack.com]] > **Full Title**: How to Make Easy Decisions > **Category**: #articles > **Tags**: #decision-making #leadership > > > **Source**: [Original URL](https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-make-easy-decisions) ## 🔦 Highlights & Commentary - You cannot put the same amount of effort into making a sundae as you put into a life-or-death situation.1 - It may seem strange to spend a whole long essay writing about easy decisions, but I think the subject is important for a couple of reasons. Principally: People are actually very bad at making easy decisions. If you struggle with easy decisions you end up spending a lot of effort on them that you could more usefully be able to spend elsewhere. People often miss that there are even any easy decisions to be made at all. Often the way to make hard decisions is to find a related easy decision to make. - An “easy decision” in the sense that I’m using here is a decision for which there is a strategy for making that is low-effort, reasonable, and not substantially worse than any higher effort strategy. - An easy decision is not one in which there is a low-effort strategy for getting the right answer. You may not be able to get the right answer. The strategy simply cannot do much worse than any higher effort strategy. If no higher effort strategy gets the right answer either, it’s still an easy decision even if you’re just guessing. - If I said “Heads or tails? Also if you guess right I’ll give you £100” you now have a scenario where it is important that you guess right (you’ll get a reward!), but you still have no ability to improve on the strategy of picking arbitrarily. No matter how much effort you put in, you cannot improve your chances of winning that £100. - If you find yourself in a scenario which you regret, cannot fix, and could have anticipated with more effort, that’s evidence that the decision wasn’t easy. - Often putting in a lot of effort into a decision that doesn’t warrant it is a way of acting responsible (if something goes wrong you can defend your actions as considered) when the reality is that you are consciously choosing to do something that is strictly worse than the alternative, which is not the responsible thing to do. - You made the right choice, it just didn’t work out. This possibility of it not working out no matter how good your decision was is one of the ongoing difficulties of making good decisions. Even when one option is obviously better, we risk the possibility of it going wrong, and we will blame ourselves when it does (and possibly others will blame us)! - resulting: Judging the quality of a decision based exclusively on its outcome. The outcome is rarely so totally under our control that we can make a decision well enough to guarantee it is good, so the fact that we got a bad outcome (while worth learning from) doesn’t mean we did anything wrong, but we treat outcomes that our downstream of our decisions as our fault. The problem here is the same as with the coin flip or dice toss: There is no way to make the decision better by putting in more effort, but by putting on a performance that you’ve tried you can emotionally protect yourself against any negative consequences. - Tags: [[favorite]] - The thing that makes easy choices hard, as we have just seen, is that there is a fear of being judged for treating them as easy. - Tags: [[favorite]] - Sometimes the uncertainty you’re experiencing is in what you know about the world rather than the world itself.5 Such decisions are often treated as hard (you need to find out more before you make the decision), but should often be treated as arbitrary instead. - One of the important features of easy decisions is that you tend to make similar easy decisions over and over again, and each time you make them you gain information, and this changes future decision making. As a result, when you don’t know what to do, but you know that all of your options are basically fine, frequently the most sensible strategy is to just pick arbitrarily - either you’ll pick right, or you’ll know more for next time you make the decision. - One consequence of this explore mode is that later decisions become easier than they are. After you’ve tried both restaurants, or gone to the weird experimental theater thing your friend invited you to, you now have enough information that a future decision is easy in a different way: You can just choose the better option, because you now have the information to know what it is. - This is one of the key ways that hard decisions can often be improved by easy decisions: You essentially hack away at the big scary thing until you find something small enough that you can safely adopt novelty seeking behaviours and just try it and see what happens. - Another way safety plays in to decision making is that sometimes you have a choice between doing things the safe way and the unsafe way, and the safe way is low enough cost that it’s obviously better. My two main examples of this are car related: Do you lock your car when walking away from it? Do you wear your seatbelt? These have the same basic structure: You are deciding in favour of a low-cost safety behaviour in order to avoid something that probably won’t happen but would be very bad if it did. - Another category of easy decision that people often miss (because it requires actively generating the decision rather than just running into it) is opportunity seeking. My central example of this is putting out a tweet saying “Hey, anyone want to hire me to do XYZ?”. These have almost the opposite structure of the car example. They probably won’t work, but they will cost you little to do, and the upside when they work is very high. As a result, you can keep doing them until they work. - If you’re sure the cost is low, the easiest way to find out whether the reward is worth it is to try it a bunch of times and see what happens, refining your actions based on the feedback you get from that.