Practical Philosophy: What to do next? Part 1: Quick answers

Practical philosophy can begin very easily: You wonder what to do next and want a really good answer to that question. What qualifies a good answer? Let’s say for the beginning that a good answer is an answer that feels right to you. That is: You want to have an answer that you don’t need to question 15 seconds later. Good, so let’s try to do that now. If you don’t have enough time to read this post, then jump to Heuristic for making quick decisions.

So, you aren’t sure what to do next. That means you feel like you have different options and are unsure about your preferences about which course of action to take. You want to make a decision. Making decisions can be incredibly difficult, or they can be easy (or both). The difficulty of making a decision mainly depends on the desired quality of your final decision. If you want to make a perfect decision, you might think until the heat death of the universe and fail to find it. If any decision suffices, you can choose it randomly and are done immediately. While a perfect decision would have the advantage of never having to question it, such a perfect luxury is practically unattainable. We need to settle for lower standards, if we want to stay capable of acting. A reasonable approach would be to start with almost random decisions and gradually increase the quality of our answers. When a real need or desire to act arises, we can chose the last best solution we could come up to. Therefore, intense philosophizing is a luxury you can only afford if you don’t need to act immediately and have some spare time. That might explain why philosophy appeared just a few thousand years ago. Between the invention of agriculture and the start of philosophy people were too busy with working and keeping themselves alive.

If you are reading this post, it probably means that you have some spare time and can afford thinking about what you want to do. But let’s assume for now that you don’t have lots of time to think about a good decision. So, what are viable options for making quick decisions?

1. Habit: If you have been in a similar situation before, you can simply do the same thing that you have done the last time in that similar situation.
2. Randomness: List your options and chose one at random. If you don’t have more than 6 options, you can assign a number from 1 to 6 to every option you have and throw a die. In the case of only 2 options, you can throw a coin. For more than 6 (or say 20) options, you can assign a sequence of “throwing results” to each of your options. (If you get a result to which you didn’t assign a decision, you can repeat the process, so you don’t need to assign an outcome to any result.)
3. Advice: You ask some other person what to do. Often authorities (for example parents, bosses, teachers, advisors, officers or religious leaders) will act pre-emptively and tell you what to do beforehand, so you don’t even have to ask them.
4. Introspection: Look deep inside yourself and determine what you want to do the most at the moment.
5. Imitation: Imitate the behavior of someone else.

These approaches work quickly, but sometimes their results are questionable. If you really want or need to decide quickly, go for it. Here are some points that might help you to weigh the pros and cons of your method of choice:

1. First of all, we do almost everything we do out of habit. You don’t have to make a lot decisions to walk, to catch something, or to bind your shoes, if you want to do just that. You don’t have to decide which muscles to contract when and how much, because you learned to do so long ago. If you had to make all those decisions consciously, your movements would be totally awkward and badly coordinated. Habits are very important to keep our conscious minds free for really high order operations, like deciding whether to work on a certain project, or to read a blog instead. Also, if your habits are good, they help you to do the right thing in most situations. There’s no need to change a working system, unless you really desire to improve some aspect of your life. And even in that case the most important part of that process is to establish the right habits.
2. Deciding randomly is a pretty legitimate approach, if the options you consider worthwhile are nearly equally good in their outcome. Often, the advantage of deciding quickly outweighs the advantage of feeling to have made the best possible decision (we are more likely to regret lost chances than actions we have taken – see the study The Experience of Regret: What, When and Why by Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec). If the consequences of your actions aren’t really important, it is really a good idea to decide randomly, once you have identified acceptable options, in order to save your time and your brain power for situations where you really need them. But, it’s not a good idea to make very important and irreversible decisions in that random fashion. The most important reason for this is that you might not have considered all possible options yet and some of them are vastly better than everything that has come to your mind before. Also, your estimates about the quality of your options might not be very good, so investing more thought into the problem is advisable.
3. Doing something what some other person tells you to do shifts the problem from making a decision yourself to deciding which person is most trustworthy in the matter of question. In that sense, this approach is no real solution to the general problem of how to decide. For determining how trustworthy the advice of someone is, you could ask other persons, but here you will face exactly the same problem again: Why trust their judgement about the trustworthiness of the first person you got your advice from? At some point, you have to use another method in order to make a final decision. A general reason not to let others decide about your actions is that they usually have much less information about your preferences than you. And they might have interests which are in conflict with your own interests. So, it’s the best to ask persons who share your interests and know you well. Of course, you can ignore that suggestion, if you are really clueless and need some kind of expert knowledge.
4. Following your strongest inner desires is a really great idea – except you pursue a very hard goal or just want to stay out of trouble. Reaching difficult goals usually requires some amount of self-discipline, which means not doing what you feel like doing at the moment. Difficult goals are best reached by making a good plan and sticking to it. And by using all kinds of useful tricks. Trouble not only comes from people who disagree with your personal preferences and decisions, but also from sticking to unhealthy habits, like consuming dangerous drugs, or simply eating too much (clothes which don’t fit anymore are troubling indeed). On the other hand, you simply cannot unfold your full potential if you do not follow your core desires. Even worse: You might get depressed and burnt out, if you don’t do what you feel is the most important thing for you to do. Nevertheless, be prepared for the case that your priorities do shift. Do not insist of having a monolithically fixed personality. Thinking like that can make you feel really miserable, as it might prevent you from making necessary changes in your life.
5. Imitating others saves your mental resources, because you don’t have to think for yourself (or at least not so much as when acting independently). It can also be fun to imitate the actions of a role-model. In any case, the quality of your decision will depend on the quality of your role-model, your knowledge about that person, and your ability to copy the behavior of other persons. So, if you want to imitate the behavior of a role-model whose skill at doing that thing is much greater than yours, then you will probably fail.

Never applying any of these methods is not only virtually impossible, but also not even sensible. Often you just have to decide quickly, so applying sophisticated methods which use up a lot of time are clearly the wrong choice. Then again, sometimes you want to apply more systematic methods in the case that you need to make a really good decision, which can withstand your rational criticism. Those methods will be the topic of the next part. But is there a clever method/heuristic for making decisions, if you really want to decide quickly? Yes! I suggest the following heuristic, but I have to admit that I don’t know how good it actually works. If you are willing to try it and to share your results, I would be very happy.
Heuristic for making quick decisions

• If you have access to reliable expert knowledge, then act in accordance with it.
• In standard situations you will do relatively fine, if you do what you have always done in such a situation. Trying to optimize your behavior won’t work very well, if you don’t have much time for thinking.
• If you have a preference for staying out of trouble: Act like everyone else around you (or like others expect you to behave), but: Don’t panic!
• Otherwise just follow your intuition / gut instincts. They might be better than you(r) think(ing).
• If all else fails, decide randomly!

Funny practical example of the random choice method | Comic by Randall Munroe: http://xkcd.com/708/ (CC-BY-NC-2.5)

So, what are the situations in which making quick decisions aren’t really good? The following motto might help you to identify those situations:

Every decision which takes more than 15 seconds to make is a bad decision – except your life depends on it.

HHELL (yeah, that guy who sometimes comments here) commented on my motto roughly in the following way:

• This rule prevents overanalyzing.
• Another possible reason for that 15 seconds bit would be inability of any human to hold (in the temporal memory) so much information that 15 seconds would not be enough for processing.
• A conclusion from that hypothesis would be that analyzing bits of a situation (for better understanding) would not count towards those 15 seconds.

Actually, the 15 seconds are rather random. It probably wouldn’t change a lot if you changed it to 10 or 20 seconds. And in fact, the motto only should be taken seriously, if the 15 seconds are interpreted as conscious consideration time. Some studies show that unconscious processes can increase the quality of decisions, if the unconscious part of your mind is given enough time to think about a problem. Read the interesting article The Beautiful Powers of Unconscious Thought for more information.