How To Break Anything

Thoughts and insights on culture and human behavior, living blissfully at the intersection of rationality and irrationality (but mostly irrationality) 
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irrationality

 

re: "How to learn from failure": time-orientation and judging events/outcomes

Learning from failure is not intuitively rational, but only because of the context we assign to the event of 'failing.' Like many problems of context and definition, it is one of time perspective.

This isn't too profound of a concept; essentially the reason time perspective applies is simply because if you're conceptually judging an decision as a 'failure' or 'success,' the only thing that matters is whether you're looking at the the immediate consequences of the decision or the distant consequences.

On a long enough timeline, every decision is a success, in the "you learn something from everything" sense. On a short enough timeline, every decision is a failure, in the "you haven't accomplished your goals yet" sense.

Obviously there's a balance to be struck here. The best part: where that balance is found is entirely within your perceptual control. (somewhat related: "If you have control over conditions, you have control over decisions)

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Filed under  //   irrationality   perspective   time-orientation  

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Decisions are about comparison. If you have control over conditions, you have control over decisions.

Decisions are fundamentally about context, in the sense that context refers to the conditions in which decisions are made. 

The easiest way to think about this is that making a decision is by definition the act of comparing conditions. 

Change the conditions, and you change the decision.

The classic example of this is the comparison one makes between three similar items of low, moderate, and high price. The smart menu planner adds an item of high price that no one will ever buy, simply so that the mid-level item can be priced higher and still seem like the best choice by comparison. This is one example, there are thousands of others. Dan Gilbert gives loads of them here in this video:

Change the conditions, and you change the decision.

If you have control over conditions, you have control over decisions.

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Filed under  //   decisionmaking   irrationality  

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"Choice," engineered and constructed like a well designed building

Behavioural economics is described (by Thaler himself) as ‘ libertarian paternalism’. This is the idea that while people should be able to live their lives as they want, “it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better”.

I find the counterintuitive reality of how we make decisions compellingly beautiful.

If you'd like, there's a rather wordy explanation of behavioral economics below:

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Filed under  //   behavioral economics   decisionmaking   irrationality  

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