How We Choose
In everyday life we are faced with multiple decisions about choosing one from among several choices. How do we view all these choices? Choosing may feel like freedom or opportunity. Choosing could also feel like a trade-off, a compromise. We may also feel that we are compelled or forced to make choices. Regardless, choosing is such a common human activity, that one should spend some time exploring and investigating what it really is about, what are the possible ways of approaching this decision problem, and how easy or hard it is to choose from among the possibilities.
Give me a philosophical view of making choices.
Give me a practical rubric for making choices.
Give me the names of some methods that help in making choices.
What is the difference between the rubric and these methods?
Best Choice Algorithm: Trivial Case
Consider a person who goes for a walk daily. Every day this person steps out of their house for a walk. At this point, the person has a decision to make. Should I turn left and walk in that direction? Or should I turn right and walk that direction? How does this person actually take that decision?
Most of the times this person would just take a random decision. They either turn left or they turn right. Since it's a daily thing, they can always take left one day, they can take right another day. Making a choice one way or the other doesn't have a significant impact. It doesn't matter much. We tend to take such decisions pretty much randomly. We may call it based on our whims and fancies. But there is no rhyme and reason to any of these decisions. There doesn't have to be.
Similarly for people who go to restaurants frequently. They would have visited pretty much all the nearby restaurants. So on the next day that they have to go, the choice is pretty much random. Whatever comes to their mind first is chosen. There is no adverse impact for choosing one over the other. And it is not a big decision either. There are going to be future days where they are going to go to restaurants and they will take the other choices.
So what is the commonality in this kind of decision making? What sort of things characterize such decisions? And what sort of decision procedure does it involve?
The key points in this kind of decision making and choices is that it seems that the choices are not even properly evaluated from any goodness criteria. The decision is made very quickly without much thought. And so it may feel random to an external observer. It may even feel random to the one who's taking the decision. For these kinds of decisions and choices, "there is no right or wrong". Any one of the available choices is good enough. So, picking choice at random is just fine.
Best Choice Algorithm: Easy Case
Imagine you want to buy a specific brand of shoe. You know the exact specification of the shoe. Further suppose that you have a choice to buy it from any one of the ten different online retail stores that sell it. All these stores also ship it for free in the next two days. Several real life cases for making a good choice are in this category; a category where many of the aspects of all the available choices are the same. This category gives meaning to the phrase "all other things being equal".
Options in this category are very easy to decide and pick the best possible choice. In our example, all one has to do is pick the retail store that sells it for the lowest price. From a mathematical perspective, one should sort those store-price combinations in ascending order of the price, and pick the store with the lowest price. Generalizing from this example, all choices can be compared on one key number, the choice that has the lowest (or highest) number is the best choice to make.
Clearly, this strategy for choosing is not the "Random Choice Strategy". There is a clear logic for making the decision. And that decision is easy to make. So one uses this strategy for such decisions.
What is an appropriate name for this strategy? What are some of the technical and social names used to mention this strategy?
Sometimes there might be a little bit of nuance. For example, one may not buy from a retail store which one does not like. However, this is basically eliminating a choice from all the possible choices. But the rest of the decision procedure is still the same. The eliminated choices were deemed inconsequential.
Best Choice Algorithm: Not So Easy Cases
Not all real life choices are either too trivial to make or too easy to make. For some real life choices, I understand that there is a rule to make the best possible choice from among a fixed number of choices that one has or one has time to pursue. I also know that this particular rule is an outcome of the solution the optimal stopping problem. Could you explain to me this optimal stopping problem and how it derives the rule to make the best choice?
Here is my summary of how the procedure or rule should be used: Note and Reject the first 37% of the choices. After that, evaluate each successive choice and if it is better than all previously seen choices, pick it. If by following the previous procedure you reach the last choice, then you have to pick it. This procedure gives me a 37% percent chance of making the best possible choice. Further, it can be mathematically proven that this is the procedure that maximizes the probability; that is, no other procedure can fetch a better probability for making picking the best from among the choices. Is that right?
The key to understanding this particular rule is to understand the following fundamental constraint: One has to look at each available choice one at a time, compare it to all previously seen choices, and make the final decision about that particular choice. The decision is either accept the choice or reject the choice. Once you have rejected a choice, you cannot go back and choose it again.
There is a reason for why once you have rejected the choice, you cannot go back to choose it again, and it is as follows: If we could revisit rejected choices, then in the first pass, we could simply look at all the possible choices reject them all. In doing so, we would know the best possible choice because we have evaluated all available choices. So, in the second pass we can simply choose the best known choice. However, this kind of perfect knowledge is not available in real life problems. In real life it is very likely that once we reject a choice, that choice is no longer available to us.
For example, if you are looking for jobs and have a job offer, then once you reject it, that job position may get filled by some other candidate and hence is no longer available to you.
For example, if you are looking for an apartment to rent, then once you have passed over that apartment, then that apartment may not be available to you as some other renter may have already rented it.
For example, if you are interviewing candidates for a job position under your organization, and once you reject a candidate, that person may not be available later as the person may find some other employment opportunity.
For example, if you are dating with the intention of choosing your life partner, then having dated someone and rejecting that person, at a much later time, you are very unlikely to find that person willing to choose you as their life partner. Even if they are available later, they may not want to choose you based on your earlier rejection.
For example, if you are selling your house and you get an offer to buy it from you and you reject it with the hope of getting a better offer, the person making the rejected offer will continue to look for a house to buy and may find one that is suitable for them and the seller. Hence the person whose offer one rejected may not be looking to buy house any more.
For what other real life best choice problems can one use this strategy?
When using this strategy, one must be aware that one is only increasing the probability of getting the best choice. This strategy does not guarantee the best choice.
What other technical or social names exist for the strategy based on the solution to the optimal stopping problem?
Can you tell me some real life choice problems where this strategy is not the most appropriate strategy to be used?
Show me a comparison table of strategies to make the best possible choice so that I can see which fits different real-life scenarios best.
Best Choice Algorithm: Harder Situations
There is a video with the title "Making Hard Choices". Can you explain the decision making ideas and process suggested in that video in plain English and also in mathematical terms.
Can you give me several examples of "making hard choices" in the sense as it is described in this video. For each of those examples, explain why the choice is hard.
What is the key aspect of these examples that makes choosing between the possible choices really hard?
When faced with hard choices, each one of those choices is not comparable to the other choices. There is no objectivity that can be applied to decide which one of them is better. The person who has to make the choice, takes a subjective decision about which one to choose. This subjective decision typically is based on people's values and principles. It is not really based on likes and dislikes because if it was based on likes and dislikes, some of those choices would have been easily eliminated before facing the hard decision. The decision to pick one of those choices is a reflection of who the person really is or wants to be. Such decisions define the person. Is that right?
There is an idea called the "Paradox of Choice". Can you explain to me this in plain English?
Can you explain the "Paradox of Choice" in mathematical terms?
So in short, one would intuitively feel that the more choices one has, it is better for oneself. But when one examines what would happen if you have got too many choices beyond a reasonable number of choices, then one realizes that those additional choices increase the amount of work that you have to do in order to make the choice. Those additional choices also increase the possibility that having made a choice you would think that one of the skipped choices was better. Is that right?
Compare and contrast the ideas from "Making Hard Choices" and the idea of "Paradox of Choice".
Besides the ideas that we have already discussed, what other ideas exist that are related to making choices?
Best Choice Algorithm: Other Perspectives
Explain to me in plain English as well as mathematically the Bounded Rationality Strategy for choosing from among the available choices. Also provide me the various technical and social names that this strategy is known by.
Explain to me in plain English as well as mathematically the strategy based on Heuristics and Biases for choosing from among the available choices. Also provide me the various technical and social names that this strategy is known by.
Explain to me in plain English as well as mathematically the strategy based on Prospect Theory for choosing from among the available choices. Also provide me the various technical and social names that this strategy is known by.
Explain to me in plain English as well as mathematically the strategy associated with Decision-Making Under Uncertainty for choosing from among the available choices. Also provide me the various technical and social names that this strategy is known by.