When taking important decisions, I spend too much time writing down the many arguments, and legibilizing the whole process for myself. This is due to completionist tendencies. Unfortunately, a more legible process doesn’t overwhelmingly imply a better decision!
Scrutinizing your main arguments is necessary, although this looks more like intuitively assessing their robustness in concept-space than making straightforward calculations, given how many implicit assumptions they all have. I can fill in many boxes, and count and weigh considerations in-depth, but that’s not a strong signal, nor what almost ever ends up swaying me towards a decision!
Rather than folding, re-folding and re-playing all of these ideas inside myself, it’s way more effective time-wise to engage my System 1 more: intuitively assess the strength of different considerations, try to brainstorm new ways in which the hidden assumptions fail, try to spot the ways in which the information I’ve received is partial… And of course, share all of this with other minds, who are much more likely to update me than my own mind. All of this looks more like rapidly racing through intuitions than filling Excel sheets, or having overly detailed scoring systems.
For example, do I really think I can BOTEC the expected counterfactual value (IN FREAKING UTILONS) of a new job position? Of course a bad BOTEC is better than none, but the extent to which that is not how our reasoning works, and the work is not really done by the BOTEC at all, is astounding. Maybe at that point you should stop calling it a BOTEC.
Marginally against legibilizing my own reasoning:
When taking important decisions, I spend too much time writing down the many arguments, and legibilizing the whole process for myself. This is due to completionist tendencies. Unfortunately, a more legible process doesn’t overwhelmingly imply a better decision!
Scrutinizing your main arguments is necessary, although this looks more like intuitively assessing their robustness in concept-space than making straightforward calculations, given how many implicit assumptions they all have. I can fill in many boxes, and count and weigh considerations in-depth, but that’s not a strong signal, nor what almost ever ends up swaying me towards a decision!
Rather than folding, re-folding and re-playing all of these ideas inside myself, it’s way more effective time-wise to engage my System 1 more: intuitively assess the strength of different considerations, try to brainstorm new ways in which the hidden assumptions fail, try to spot the ways in which the information I’ve received is partial… And of course, share all of this with other minds, who are much more likely to update me than my own mind. All of this looks more like rapidly racing through intuitions than filling Excel sheets, or having overly detailed scoring systems.
For example, do I really think I can BOTEC the expected counterfactual value (IN FREAKING UTILONS) of a new job position? Of course a bad BOTEC is better than none, but the extent to which that is not how our reasoning works, and the work is not really done by the BOTEC at all, is astounding. Maybe at that point you should stop calling it a BOTEC.