This looks like an effect of computational costs, not a strategic mistake. Listing the results of two decisions costs time / cognitive effort (i.e., computation); applying a heuristic (intuitively compare action A to action B) is computationally cheaper, but—as you discovered—more error-prone.
Thus, though you chide people for “using intuition on a level that’s unnecessarily high” [emphasis mine], in fact applying intuition (i.e. heuristics) on a higher level may be quite necessary, for boundedness-of-rationality / computational-cost reasons.
That’s why I said it should be used “on questions of medium importance”. For small recurring decisions, the computational cost could be too high, and for life-changing decisions, one would hopefully have covered this ground already (although on reflection, there are probably counter-arguments here, too). But for everything that we explicitly spend some time on anyway, not bothering to list consequences seems like a strategic mistake to me. Even in the example I used with only 45 seconds available for each turn, I had enough time to do this. And I did spend some time on this decision, I just used it to double and triple check with my intuition, rather than going lower.
This looks like an effect of computational costs, not a strategic mistake. Listing the results of two decisions costs time / cognitive effort (i.e., computation); applying a heuristic (intuitively compare action A to action B) is computationally cheaper, but—as you discovered—more error-prone.
Thus, though you chide people for “using intuition on a level that’s unnecessarily high” [emphasis mine], in fact applying intuition (i.e. heuristics) on a higher level may be quite necessary, for boundedness-of-rationality / computational-cost reasons.
That’s why I said it should be used “on questions of medium importance”. For small recurring decisions, the computational cost could be too high, and for life-changing decisions, one would hopefully have covered this ground already (although on reflection, there are probably counter-arguments here, too). But for everything that we explicitly spend some time on anyway, not bothering to list consequences seems like a strategic mistake to me. Even in the example I used with only 45 seconds available for each turn, I had enough time to do this. And I did spend some time on this decision, I just used it to double and triple check with my intuition, rather than going lower.