Making tough decisions

[jay gw]

Uh, don't know exactly how to ask this, but

do any of you have a way of making tough decisions? How do you make a decision when you don't have enough information, can't get information, can't predict the future....

There are decisions and there are DECISIONS. You know, "should I get married" or "what should I major in" or "should I have this baby". The kinds of things that if you do something wrong, you can't go back and change it.

Just wondering.

(not exactly religion but maybe it's philosophical. Didn't know where else to put it.)

 

[evildave]

The key to any decision (or 'DECISION') is simply to MAKE IT. In general, even the toughest of tough decisions are truly inconsequential. For instance, "Should I get married?" is an obvious one. If you find yourself so torn by the question, perhaps you should more closely examine your motivations to marry. Is it because you love and trust and respect and want to spend the rest of your life with him/her, or because "Me so horny!"? In general, your life will only be different, according to whether you marry this person or not. Not (typically) better or worse. Just different.

Any arbitrary means of making a decision is about as good in the long run as agonizing over it for weeks. If you are agonizing over it, you simply don't have enough information, and there are several ways to break the deadlock.

1. Get more information. Do some more research and try to be level-minded about it.
2. Talk to any other people involved in the decision.
3. Ask advice. Talk to family or close personal friends about your dilemma.
4. Roll the dice. Flip a coin. Flip open a book to a page at random and read a paragraph. Any other randomizer.
5. If all else fails, do absolutely nothing at all, and the problem will usually solve its self, one way or another.

Most importantly, once the decision is made, do not look back and torture yourself with 'what if' scenarios. If you were truly so deadlocked on how you should proceed, you honestly didn't know how it would turn out either way, you could fantasize yourself a paradise of "only if", but for all you know you'd have been run over by a bus the day after you made the other decision.

Life is fairly forgiving for every bad decision there is a remedy, and for every good decision there's a curse. Lots of marriages end in divorce. Lots of people change their major. Lots of people end up raising children they hadn't planned to. There are no permanent consequences, except death. Even with a child, you're more or less done in 20 years or so, as long as you do your job right. It's only ever really living the same life a little differently and making adjustments, and you'll make adjustments whether you change things in big ways or small ways.

 

[Dymanic]

Originally posted by jay gw

How do you make a decision when you don't have enough information, can't get information, can't predict the future....

I am convinced that the bulk of my decision-making takes place automatically and intuitively. The difficulty usually has to do with the degree to which I am willing to trust the process (I have, after all, frequently found my intuitition to be error-prone). What it really boils down to then is: how much time do I have before failing to act becomes a decision in itself? If an oncoming car is in my lane, my decision as to whether to swerve left or right will be handled reflexively. Waiting until a point of absolute certainty as to the correct choice might well be a fatally expensive luxury.

If I start feeling blocked, I like to remind myself that every single one of my ancestors had the ability to make this kind of decision with reliable enough results to avoid disaster for at least fourteen or so years.

 

[TragicMonkey]

It's easy. Flip a coin. When you get the results and then say "best out of three", it means that you really want to do the opposite of whatever the first flip gave you. You had already made the decision but hadn't realized it until then.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Start with n options.

Swither, dither, procrastinate and do nothing until n-1 options have lapsed.

Do what is now inevitable.

Promise to do better next time.

 

[Marquis de Carabas]

Do they not have Magic 8 Balls where you're from?

 

[Dymanic]

Of course, we all saw at once that this is actually a question about global warming, right?

 

[jimmygun]

Ask yourself..."Can I live with this decision?" meaning if I decide right and everything is aces yes, if I decided wrong can I continue as a person of my word, yes or no?

If for any reason you find yourself not sure that you can live with your own decisions then step away.

 

[jay gw]

Roll the dice. Flip a coin. Flip open a book to a page at random and read a paragraph. Any other randomizer.

Why would you want a randomizer? Several people mentioned coin tosses, but I can't tell if they're being serious.

So basically, none of you make decisions using any tools, or formal methods. Weird. I had expected something else.

I'm right back where I started. Thanks alot.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Why would you want a randomizer? Several people mentioned coin tosses, but I can't tell if they're being serious.

So basically, none of you make decisions using any tools, or formal methods. Weird. I had expected something else.

I'm right back where I started. Thanks alot.

I was being serious. You could make lists of pros and cons, but they're all already in your head. Flip the coin, saying to yourself that you're going to abide by how it falls. When it lands, you will either feel relief, or immediately say "Let's try best out of three". Either way, your own reaction will demonstrate which alternative is the one you really want to do.

I'm not leaving it up to a random coin toss--I'm just using the coin to reveal the decision I've already made without knowing it.

 

[jay gw]

I'm not leaving it up to a random coin toss--I'm just using the coin to reveal the decision I've already made without knowing it.

How do you make a decision without knowing you've made it?

 

[TragicMonkey]

How do you make a decision without knowing you've made it?

Hell if I can explain it. Shrinks would probably call it the subconscious. Or maybe it's just very fast spur-of-the-moment stuff. It happens to me quite frequently--I'll be considering a decision and boom, there it is. Maybe it's just going with instinct?

 

[Soapy Sam]

TM- Classic User Illusion stuff. Your brain is processing millions of bits of information per second, about 16 of them consciously.
Hardly surprising the answer is suddenly just there, in the spotlight. I often wonder who it is that decides I'm getting out of bed in the morning.

It is this single issue which makes me so contemptuous of empty argument about free will.

 

[jay gw]

It is this single issue which makes me so contemptuous of empty argument about free will.

What does that mean?

 

[Gulliamo]

I do not take the same "light" approach that many here do to decision making. I believe that decision making is a skill. And, like any skill, can be refined and gets better/easier with structured practice. If you would like references to the above please ask.

I believe that most decisions can and should fall into a structure that I learned in the military, aptly named "The military decision making process". Do a search for that phrase and you will find more info... I will summarize and give anecdotes.

It goes something like this...

Step 1 Receive the Mission
Step 2 Analyze the mission
Step 3 Analyze assets
Step 4 Gather intelligence
Step 5 Develop courses of action
Step 6 Analyze Courses of Action
Step 7 Develop the plan
Step 8 Develop a contingent plan
Step 9 Make the decision

I will elaborate on each...
1. Figure out that you have a decision to make. Should I buy the car?
2. What impact will the decision have? I will have a car and it’s payments or I will walk.
3. Do I have the money to buy the car?
4. Is this the best car at the best price? What are the ratings? What do my car expert friends think? What do my bus taking friends think?
5. I can take a loan or buy a monthly bus pass.
6. A bus pass would be cheaper, a car would be faster.
7a. I will take out a loan to buy the car.
7b. If the payments are overwhelming I will sell the car and buy the bus pass.
8. As Gulliamo Sr. always taught- "You make decisions and you live with them."

This approach has served me well. Tell me what you think...

 

[Dymanic]

Originally posted by Gulliamo

This approach has served me well. Tell me what you think...

I think the military decision making process often leaves out the most important step: Define The Objective.
Current events contain some excellent examples of this failure.

 

[Gulliamo]

I think the military decision making process often leaves out the most important step: Define The Objective.

I disagree. Defining the objective is step number one! Whether the objective is received from someone else in a military scenario or defined by circumstance or defined by yourself it is still step one.

I wrote:

Current events contain some excellent examples of this failure.

Assuming you are talking about Iraq I cannot help but agree. It just goes to show that even the best system can be distorted by humans. Even our acclaimed scientific method is subject to human failures.

 

[Gulliamo]

I am convinced that the bulk of my decision-making takes place automatically and intuitively...
If an oncoming car is in my lane, my decision as to whether to swerve left or right will be handled reflexively.

Some decisions must be made ahead of time (If a car enters my lane I will swerve right into the ditch rather than left into the oncoming traffic) and many more intuitively; but I do not believe this is the nature of the OP.

How do you make tough decisions? Did you instinctively decide what your collegiate major should be?

 

[Anathema]

In risk situtations, in which action must be taken without as much information as I'm "comfortable" with, I fall back on the old "worst case scenario". Take a look at the possible courses of action, and for each, determine what is the worst probable outcome of each. For each suboptimal outcome, can some mitigating strategy be employed? Or, can you handle the "worst case" as it is?

As long as the penalties of imperfect decisions are amorphous, they appear more daunting than they may actually be. Sometimes, you just have to work through the range of possible choices and outcomes, and determine which course will yield the best results ---- and have a "Plan B" if the defecation hits the venitilation.

 

[Marquis de Carabas]

It goes something like this...

Step 1 Receive the Mission
Step 2 Analyze the mission
Step 3 Analyze assets
Step 4 Gather intelligence
Step 5 Develop courses of action
Step 6 Analyze Courses of Action
Step 7 Develop the plan
Step 8 Develop a contingent plan
Step 9 Make the decision

While I agree that is a good decision making process in general, I don't feel it completely answers the OP. (Though the OP is not mine, so whether that is helpful to jay is his *ahem* decision.) It seems to me the "tough" decisions are the ones where you've followed steps 1-6, but the course isn't clear. You've weighed the variables, thought about your overarching goals, but the final answer isn't available in some neat package.

To take your later college major example. Say my overarching goal is to make gobs of dosh. Well, Philosophy's right out the door, along with some others, but the field is still pretty wide. To arbitrarily narrow the field to two, let's say Law or Medicine.

Either will make me some fairly serious bank if I follow through, but which am I more interested in? Which am I more suited for? What about free time? When will I be able to retire? You get the idea.

All these questions, and more, can be researched according to the typical decision-making formula, but only up to a point. The future is too murky, too probablistic, too chaotic to make this decision with 100% confidence that it is the right one.

Any decision making faculty cannot be rules all the way down. At some point, as evildave said above, one just has to MAKE IT. Eventually, you have to execute, because you never have all the facts.

I happen to like TM's suggestion about the coin flips, but for a slightly different reason than he stated. I don't think it's so much that it shows us what we really want. It shows us what desire is currently in the driver's seat of the useful fiction of the self. It seems to me short-term desires would overrule long-term goals more often than not in this method. (Well, there's this really hot chick who's taking Pre-Law, so screw Medicine.) I think the use of the coin is good because it forces the decision. If all variables have been accounted for, and you're still unsure, why not just flip a coin? It's no less arbitrary than anything else one might do.