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Overview
There aren’t many sure things in life, so when we make decisions, we play the odds. We can’t know every single relevant variable when making up our minds.
Life-changing decisions are a matter of luck, but they’re more like probabilities than pure chance. The way we make those decisions is related to the way our brains work.
So, what can you control? A lot more than you think. You will learn that hard luck stories are a waste of time and how car accidents are always someone else’s fault. Time travel might be the best tool for making decisions because it allows us to look into the future and see what happens if we make certain choices.
Big Idea #1: Human minds tend to confuse decisions with their outcomes, which makes it hard to see mistakes clearly.
Super Bowl XLIX ended with controversy. The Seattle Seahawks were leading the game by 10 points, and everyone expected them to finish off their opponent by running out the clock. Their coach, Pete Carroll, instead told his quarterback to pass the ball in a risky play that backfired. It turned out to be one of the worst calls in Super Bowl history.
A player was out at first base, but the umpire called him safe. It wasn’t his fault; it was a reasonable call in that situation. The problem is that he made the wrong call.
The tendency to confuse the quality of a decision with its outcome is called gambler’s fallacy, and it’s dangerous. An example would be someone who gets into a car accident after they’ve been drinking but thinks that driving drunk was a good idea because they didn’t get in an accident.
In reality, most decisions are not all right or all wrong. Life is more like poker because it’s a game of incomplete information and luck. We make bets based on what we think will happen in the future, just as poker players do with their hands.
Instead of thinking about our decisions as being right or wrong, we can think about them in terms of probability. If we’re betting on something, then we can say that it will probably happen 76 percent of the time and not 24 percent. We’re not 100 percent sure what will happen; however, we are sure that the outcome is within a certain range.
Big Idea #2: If we want to seek out truth, we have to work around our hardwired tendency to believe what we hear.
We all want to make good decisions. But saying, “I believe X to be the best option” first requires good-quality beliefs. Good-quality beliefs are informed and well thought out. We can’t expect to form good quality beliefs with lazy thinking; we have to strive for truth and objectivity even when something doesn’t align with our current belief system.
Truth-seeking is important, but it’s not natural. We’re wired to be more cautious of new ideas. For example, if you hear a lion rustling in the grass, you’ll probably run away without thinking about it very much.
Language is what allowed people to communicate ideas and beliefs that were not directly experienced. This ability led to the formation of abstract beliefs. However, we still tend to believe things without questioning them because our old belief-forming methods are habitually used even with new information. In 1993, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert conducted experiments where he showed participants statements that were either true or false and then asked them questions later about whether they remembered which ones had been true or false. The result was a tendency for subjects to simply believe that all the statements had been true, even those in which they knew some of the statements were actually false!
It’s easy to form beliefs, but it’s hard to change them. Our minds seek out information that confirms our beliefs and ignore or work against anything contradictory. We want to think well of ourselves, so we avoid the feeling of being wrong by seeking out evidence that confirms our beliefs.
