Created: January 09, 2021
Modified: January 18, 2021
Modified: January 18, 2021
analysis paralysis
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- I used to play board games with ExBoyfriend and his friend Will. Will was literally getting a PhD in game studies, and almost always beat the pants off of us, even in new games that none of us had ever played before. Not only did he usually win, he usually made his moves quickly, so he wasn't winning because he spent more time thinking than the rest of us.
- By contrast, I often spent a long time thinking about moves, especially important moves. I wanted to understand the game and think through the ramifications of each possible action. I'd try to calculate expected payoffs. I'd generate arguments and counterarguments around possible strategies. My friends just had to sit and wait for me to do all of this thinking, while they got steadily more pissed off at me. And it usually wasn't even that helpful; the accumulation of factors to consider usually left usually left me with no more clarity than I'd started with.
- Will's insight was that there's nothing wrong with losing a game. Even though he usually won, his ego wasn't bound up with winning. He understood that it's just a game; his goal was to explore the game and try things out.
- Playing quickly meant that he got to try things faster. He'd play through a game five times in an hour, sometimes losing and sometimes winning, but at the end he'd understand the game much better than if he had only been able to play through once because he thought hard about every move.
- Of course, there are some decisions that are really worth thinking hard about. But most decisions are either (low-consequence or easy to reverse). Why think when you can experiment?
- I need to acknowledge and consciously avoid my tendency to get 'stuck' trying to figure out the best thing to do in every situation.