Whenever a decision seems very close, I flip a coin to decide, and then I check to see if I wish the coin had gone the other way. If so then I go against the coin.
I might sometimes be ‘agreeing’ with the coin because I’m primed by its outcome, but overall I find it useful for saving time. I rarely regret decisions made this way.
“Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind, and you’re hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No—not so that chance shall decide the affair while you’re passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you’re hoping.”
That’s from Piet Hein, a poet (and mathematician) I recommend. But I’m afraid I don’t see the link to priming.
Priming:
In trying to explain myself, I think I’ve found I’m wrong:
If the coin comes up heads and tells me to go through the blue door. I’ll say to myself ‘ok I’m going through the blue door.’ in order to gauge my own reaction to that. I think sometimes I’ll be biased to overlook problems with the blue door merely because that’s the way I’m already mentally heading. On writing this out I see how it’s different than priming.
I’ve tried this in the past, but now I find I can tell how I’d feel without flipping the coin. If I’m unsure about a decision, flipping the coin no longer helps—it just brings to mind what I don’t like about whichever option comes up.
I found, that for me, the same thing works well without a coin. If I am ambivalent on decisions, I just pick one and if I instantly have a feeling that I should have gone the other way, I will switch. The problem with the algorithm is that it when the choices are actually close to equivalent, it takes a bit of strength of will not to repeat the process ad nauseam.
This sounds like using the observation of your spontaneous rationalization to figure out what you think is actually true, mastering rationalization to point the way to the right answer. Truly bizarre.
If the coin agrees with your hidden opinion, you agree with the coin, because the coin was right. If the coin disagrees, you disagree with the coin, because it came up wrong side. Far from crystal-clear analogy, but it feels to me that way.
Another try: you focus the uncertainty in abstraction attached to a coin, trying to feel your decision in form of your concrete attitude to this object. Where before you had a thousand currents of value and evidence, now you focus them on a single clear-cut abstraction of value, before you actually make a decision. The focus isn’t constrained by additional ritual, like writing down your decision and accompanying explanation, it’s pure abstraction extracted directly from your mind.
It certainly will sometimes: I suspect that sometimes both options are acceptable to me, and neither will feel like a great loss if not followed; in this case I will likely end up following the coin.
Or I ‘hiddenly’ dread both options, or would feel either as loss, in which case I will recoil against the choice of the coin (and possibly recoil again against the other option as well, leaving back where I started.)
But I generally use this when I am otherwise indecisive, where further analysis is more trouble than it’s worth. So even when the randomness leads me astray, it doesn’t cost me much.
My ex used to privately assign two menu items to the numbers one and two, and then ask me aloud to pick one or two, then see how she felt about my response.
Sorry for intruding on an very old post, but checking ‘peoplerandom’ integers modulo 2 is worse than flipping a coin—when asked for a random number, people tend to choose odd numbers more often than even numbers, and prime numbers more often than non-prime numbers.
The second is also implied by the first, if “primes more often than non-primes” means “out of proportion with how many primes there are” rather than “more than 50% of the time”, and I think it would be equally interesting to look at whether [odd] primes are more likely to be chosen than odd non-primes.
I wonder if the real issue is “that the person can/can’t recall (part of) the factorization offhand”—that would make sense if people avoid numbers that “feel round”—something with an obscure factorization like 51 [3*17] might be more likely to be chosen than even numbers, multiples of 11, numbers that appear on a multiplication table (so, 3 times numbers 10 or less).
Whenever a decision seems very close, I flip a coin to decide, and then I check to see if I wish the coin had gone the other way. If so then I go against the coin.
I might sometimes be ‘agreeing’ with the coin because I’m primed by its outcome, but overall I find it useful for saving time. I rarely regret decisions made this way.
“Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No—not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.”
That’s from Piet Hein, a poet (and mathematician) I recommend. But I’m afraid I don’t see the link to priming.
That’s awesome, thank you!
Priming: In trying to explain myself, I think I’ve found I’m wrong: If the coin comes up heads and tells me to go through the blue door. I’ll say to myself ‘ok I’m going through the blue door.’ in order to gauge my own reaction to that. I think sometimes I’ll be biased to overlook problems with the blue door merely because that’s the way I’m already mentally heading. On writing this out I see how it’s different than priming.
I’ve tried this in the past, but now I find I can tell how I’d feel without flipping the coin. If I’m unsure about a decision, flipping the coin no longer helps—it just brings to mind what I don’t like about whichever option comes up.
I found, that for me, the same thing works well without a coin. If I am ambivalent on decisions, I just pick one and if I instantly have a feeling that I should have gone the other way, I will switch. The problem with the algorithm is that it when the choices are actually close to equivalent, it takes a bit of strength of will not to repeat the process ad nauseam.
This sounds like using the observation of your spontaneous rationalization to figure out what you think is actually true, mastering rationalization to point the way to the right answer. Truly bizarre.
If I wish the coin had gone the other way, where’s the rationalization?
If the coin agrees with your hidden opinion, you agree with the coin, because the coin was right. If the coin disagrees, you disagree with the coin, because it came up wrong side. Far from crystal-clear analogy, but it feels to me that way.
Another try: you focus the uncertainty in abstraction attached to a coin, trying to feel your decision in form of your concrete attitude to this object. Where before you had a thousand currents of value and evidence, now you focus them on a single clear-cut abstraction of value, before you actually make a decision. The focus isn’t constrained by additional ritual, like writing down your decision and accompanying explanation, it’s pure abstraction extracted directly from your mind.
Exactly. The point is to elicit the hidden opinion, which is presumed to be “good enough”.
I expect the result of this experiment to depend on which side the coin actually came up.
It certainly will sometimes: I suspect that sometimes both options are acceptable to me, and neither will feel like a great loss if not followed; in this case I will likely end up following the coin. Or I ‘hiddenly’ dread both options, or would feel either as loss, in which case I will recoil against the choice of the coin (and possibly recoil again against the other option as well, leaving back where I started.)
But I generally use this when I am otherwise indecisive, where further analysis is more trouble than it’s worth. So even when the randomness leads me astray, it doesn’t cost me much.
My ex used to privately assign two menu items to the numbers one and two, and then ask me aloud to pick one or two, then see how she felt about my response.
I ask for any integer, and determine it’s value modulo 2, or modulo 3 if I have an extra option.
Sorry for intruding on an very old post, but checking ‘peoplerandom’ integers modulo 2 is worse than flipping a coin—when asked for a random number, people tend to choose odd numbers more often than even numbers, and prime numbers more often than non-prime numbers.
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The second is also implied by the first, if “primes more often than non-primes” means “out of proportion with how many primes there are” rather than “more than 50% of the time”, and I think it would be equally interesting to look at whether [odd] primes are more likely to be chosen than odd non-primes.
I wonder if the real issue is “that the person can/can’t recall (part of) the factorization offhand”—that would make sense if people avoid numbers that “feel round”—something with an obscure factorization like 51 [3*17] might be more likely to be chosen than even numbers, multiples of 11, numbers that appear on a multiplication table (so, 3 times numbers 10 or less).