That article is half-joking, and still qualifies its advice a lot:
This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, obviously—more appropriate for choosing from a restaurant menu than choosing a major in college. [...]
Does this have any moral for larger dilemmas, like choosing a major in college? Here, it’s more likely that you’re in a state of ignorance, than that you would have no real preference over outcomes. Then if you’re agonizing, the obvious choice is “gather more information”—get a couple of part-time jobs that let you see the environment you would be working in. And, logically, you can defer the agonizing until after that.[...]
I do think there’s something to be said for agonizing over important decisions, but only so long as the agonization process is currently going somewhere, not stuck.
We can actually try to quantify ‘Is this process going somewhere?‘, by calculating the expected value for ‘donate to MIRI’, ‘donate to FHI’, etc., thinking about it some more, and then re-calculating (say, a week later). If after thinking about it and researching it a lot, your estimates are approximately the same (in absolute terms, and correcting for e.g. anchoring), then the process hasn’t been useful, and this may be a case where agonizing is a waste of time.
If you’re weighing Cause A against Cause B, and in March you expect 38 utilons from A and 41 from B, and in April you expect 42 utilons from A and 40 from B, then you’ll have a hard time making up your mind, but the decision probably isn’t very important.
On the other hand, if in March you expect 38 from A and 41 from B, and in April you expect 1500 from A and 90 from B, and in May you expect 150 from A and 190 from B.… then your decision is still difficult, but now it’s probably reasonable for you to continue agonizing about it, where by ‘agonizing’ we mean ‘acquiring more information and processing it more rigorously’.
This isn’t an absolute rule, though. If a lot of value is at stake, and you’re rigorous enough to estimate value to a lot of significant digits, then even if your preferences keep switching by proportionally small amounts, your decision may matter a lot in absolute terms. E.g., the choice between $5,000,010,000 and $5,000,000,000 matters a lot in a world where $10,000 can save lives.
Seems like a case of harder choices matter less.
I strongly disagree. The choice is “hard” due to a lack of information rather than strong evidence that the choices have approximately equal utility.
Yes. Except this is one of those cases where more information could help, which I’m trying to gather by starting this thread.
That article is half-joking, and still qualifies its advice a lot:
We can actually try to quantify ‘Is this process going somewhere?‘, by calculating the expected value for ‘donate to MIRI’, ‘donate to FHI’, etc., thinking about it some more, and then re-calculating (say, a week later). If after thinking about it and researching it a lot, your estimates are approximately the same (in absolute terms, and correcting for e.g. anchoring), then the process hasn’t been useful, and this may be a case where agonizing is a waste of time.
If you’re weighing Cause A against Cause B, and in March you expect 38 utilons from A and 41 from B, and in April you expect 42 utilons from A and 40 from B, then you’ll have a hard time making up your mind, but the decision probably isn’t very important.
On the other hand, if in March you expect 38 from A and 41 from B, and in April you expect 1500 from A and 90 from B, and in May you expect 150 from A and 190 from B.… then your decision is still difficult, but now it’s probably reasonable for you to continue agonizing about it, where by ‘agonizing’ we mean ‘acquiring more information and processing it more rigorously’.
This isn’t an absolute rule, though. If a lot of value is at stake, and you’re rigorous enough to estimate value to a lot of significant digits, then even if your preferences keep switching by proportionally small amounts, your decision may matter a lot in absolute terms. E.g., the choice between $5,000,010,000 and $5,000,000,000 matters a lot in a world where $10,000 can save lives.