Making good decisions is synonymous with being effective in the world. The art of accurate decision-making is at the intersection of epistemic rationality (understanding the world) and instrumental rationality (taking action).
There is no pre-workshop reading or assignment. All content on this page is for the cohort meeting.
Non-facilitators should avoid reading blocks marked as Facilitator, such as the one below, since they contain spoilers about the problems.
Instructional Material
Our minds have default tools for evaluating decisions, and we use these tools intuitively as we make mundane decisions. When a person experiences damage to the region of the brain that generates emotional responses, they will have enormous difficulty making basic decisions, such as where to eat lunch. This fact highlights the degree to which your "feeling" about your options informs your decision-making process.
This week we will deconstruct the most common "feelings" about decisions into numbers, and thereby decode the useful work our emotional mind is doing for us. Your feelings about decisions can be broadly broken down into distinct emotional types.
- Risky: The least favored and most favored outcomes are associated with the same option, meaning that a single option could yield either a very good or very bad outcome.
- Least-bad choice: The favorable outcomes are all low-likelihood and/or the unfavorable outcomes are all high-likelihood, so you are in the emotional position of choosing the "least bad" option. Either choice has a low EV.
- Uncertain: All of your probability estimates fall in the ~35%-65% range. You have a hard time choosing because you just don't feel strongly one way or the other about the likelihoods involved.
- High-stakes: The decision is unusually consequential.
- High utility variance: Involving extremely high or extremely low possible outcomes, with nothing in the middle.
Errands at Station Seven [20 minutes]
For each errand, try to figure out what emotional type it is.
Choice of Food [5 minutes]
On your break from repolarizing the tachyon coils you want to grab a quick bite to eat. You really don't want to be late getting back to your work station, so it's important that you're able to eat and be back within half an hour. There are two eateries you enjoy, Garg's Noodles and GleekBurger. Garg's Noodles is your favorite, but it's further away, all the way on the other side of the disk. GleekBurger is alright, and closer.
What kind of emotional type does this choice fall into?
| Probability | Utility | EV (P*U) | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Noodles | 0.8 | 30 | 24 | Good food, late |
| 0.2 | 100 | 20 | Good food, punctual | |
| Choice EV | 44 | |||
| Burger | 0.3 | 0 | 0 | Mediocre food, late |
| 0.7 | 70 | 49 | Mediocre food, punctual | |
| Choice EV | 49 |
Dry Cleaning [5 minutes]
You need to take your uniforms to the cleaners. There are two competing cleaning operations on the station. SpiffyClean almost always does an okay job, returning your uniforms clean, if not very well pressed. Even when they mess up, the result is acceptable. Admiralty Cleaning claims to hold themselves to a higher standard, and when they return your uniforms, they are perfectly starched. However, a shocking fraction of the time they lose one or more articles of clothing.
What kind of emotional type does this choice fall into?
| Probability | Utility | EV (P*U) | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Admiralty | 0.4 | 0 | 0 | Lost clothing |
| 0.6 | 100 | 60 | Perfectly starched | |
| Choice EV | 60 | |||
| Spiffy | 0.1 | 50 | 5 | Wrinkled uniform |
| 0.9 | 70 | 63 | Decently clean | |
| Choice EV | 68 |
Heading Home [5 minutes]
After dropping off your dry cleaning, you head home, but realize that your apartment unit is almost exactly on the other side of the toroid, and thus you're not sure which way to turn to take the shortest drip home. Your gut tells you that the trip would be slightly shorter if you went right, but you're unsure enough that you hesitate to commit.
What kind of emotional type does this choice fall into?
| Probability | Utility | EV (P*U) | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Left | 0.55 | 0 | 0 | Longer route |
| 0.45 | 100 | 45 | Shorter route | |
| Choice EV | 45 | |||
| Right | 0.45 | 0 | 0 | Longer route |
| 0.55 | 100 | 55 | Shorter route | |
| Choice EV | 55 |
Promotion [5 minutes]
When you arrive home, you check your mail and see that you've just been offered a promotion. Your rank will increase, and along with it your pay. This is amazing news. But you have a sinking feeling as you realize the promotion will require you to move out of Maintenance, a career path that you love, and into Navigation. You are severely conflicted, as you can see both paths leading to positive outcomes. There's a small chance that you would bitterly regret not taking the promotion, but there's also a small chance that you would hate working in Navigation.
What kind of emotional type does this choice fall into?
| Probability | Utility | EV (P*U) | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Take Promotion | 0.8 | 100 | 80 | Like Navigation |
| 0.2 | 10 | 2 | Hate Navigation | |
| Choice EV | 82 | |||
| Reject Promotion | 0.9 | 95 | 85.5 | Maintenance works out |
| 0.1 | 0 | 0 | Bitter regret | |
| Choice EV | 85.5 |
Break [10 minutes]
Take a ten-minute break.
Exploring Decisions [30 minutes]
Take turns going around the cohort.
Each member should state a decision that they made recently. Discuss the emotional type of the decision. Why does this decision feel the way it does? Spend about five minutes on each person's decision
Decision Analysis [30 minutes]
Take turns going around the cohort.
Each member should put forth a decision that they're thinking about. The decision can be big or small. Whether you're pondering a change in career, waffling on whether to upgrade your PC, or deciding whether to dye your hair, if it's something you're having trouble making your mind up about, it's a valid decision to discuss.
If you can, try to put forth a binary decision with two options and two outcomes associated with each option. This isn't required, though, and the important thing is that everyone puts forth something.
Assess the decision put forth. What emotional type does it belong to? If there are disagreements, explore what caused them. Nobody can be "right" or "wrong" about their emotional reaction, but it can be interesting to collect different people's reactions in order to better understand your own.
Wrap Up
If there's time remaining, break your decision down using the usual workflow and build a decision tree.
By now, you have begun to learn to quickly understand why you are having difficulty with a given decision, so that you can either practically resolve or emotionally understand and accept that factor and then move on.