Not always—every once in awhile you’ll find a solution that is a pareto-improvement: better on all dimensions than the next-best alternative. Those are good days!
One reason that most of your actual decisions involve tradeoffs is that easy no-tradeoff decisions get made quickly and don’t take up much of your time, so you don’t notice them. Many of the clear wins with no real downside are already baked into the context of the choices you’re making. For the vast majority of topics you’ll face, you’re late in the idea-evolution process, and the trivial wins are already in there.
They are good days indeed! As for your second point, I whole-heartedly agree. I was trying to allude to this in my last two sentences, especially the part in parentheses:
Throwing out obviously-poor solutions is easy (and is sometimes done subconsciously when you’re working in your domain of expertise, or done by other people before a decision gets to you), but weighing the remaining options usually takes some consideration. So, our subjective experience is that we spend most of our time and energy thinking about trade-offs.
But I think I should have dedicated more time to it. Originally I had a sentence in there that was something like “when I get dressed in the morning, I don’t celebrate the fact that putting my pants on forwards instead of backwards is both easier and more comfortable—I just do it that way automatically!”. You’ve expressed it better than I have, so I’m going to add your paragraph into the main post (credited to you of course).
Not always—every once in awhile you’ll find a solution that is a pareto-improvement: better on all dimensions than the next-best alternative. Those are good days!
One reason that most of your actual decisions involve tradeoffs is that easy no-tradeoff decisions get made quickly and don’t take up much of your time, so you don’t notice them. Many of the clear wins with no real downside are already baked into the context of the choices you’re making. For the vast majority of topics you’ll face, you’re late in the idea-evolution process, and the trivial wins are already in there.
They are good days indeed! As for your second point, I whole-heartedly agree. I was trying to allude to this in my last two sentences, especially the part in parentheses:
But I think I should have dedicated more time to it. Originally I had a sentence in there that was something like “when I get dressed in the morning, I don’t celebrate the fact that putting my pants on forwards instead of backwards is both easier and more comfortable—I just do it that way automatically!”. You’ve expressed it better than I have, so I’m going to add your paragraph into the main post (credited to you of course).