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.
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.