I can immediately hear the objections to my thesis from the previous article.
What if closer scrutiny would reveal a serious problem with one of the choices? Well, if that were likely, people wouldn’t be bickering back and forth. It would be obvious that one choice is flawed, dangerous or whatever, and everybody would avoid it. But if it’s one of the most frequently bought options, and the most serious concerns with it are in the order of “I’m not sure I like the sound better than the other one”, be assured you’re not going to die from the consequences of a wrong choice.
But what if you are? I mean, going to die from the consequences? What if it’s actually serious, like choosing inadequate climbing equipment, or even worse, choosing inadequate mountaineering guides who get you killed? I don’t think the equation changes. If there are red flags, warnings, bad feeling about something, then by all means, heed those. If there’s no reason to assume something is wrong either way, then you simply don’t have enough information to make a choice, and the safest choice would probably be to do nothing until you are actually knowledgeable enough to be able to tell the difference between safe and dangerous. The choice, in this case, is to become more informed, because the current choice, where you can’t tell the difference, and the cost of choosing wrong is high, is a trap. It’s a situation you don’t want to be in.
So, we are introducing another element: experience, and how to attain it. The general advice would be to attain experience by doing something that has very small cost of choosing wrong, but allows you the opportunity of trial and error. An example of this is when you are a new driver, and you need to choose a car, but you don’t know anything about cars, except that they cost lots of money, and you’re not sure what you should buy, because you don’t want to either waste money or choose a car that’s bad for you.
My advice would be to choose the most common model in the price range you can afford, and then try it and see if there’s anything wrong with it that you can immediately notice. If there is, your experimentation already yielded a datapoint for you, so you’re no longer at the starting position where you don’t know anything. At some point, you need to pick an option based on imperfect knowledge, and just gain more experience, and that will allow you to make a more informed choice.
It’s common for total beginners to be unreasonable with their demands, because they don’t know what they’re doing. For instance, they want a car that can do anything, because they have no idea about what they are going to use it for, and they don’t want to reduce their options. It’s the same with photography – the total beginners want a camera/lens that can do “everything”, and they end up putting a 14-500mm f/1.4 lens on their wish list, because who knows what they’ll end up taking pictures of. The experienced photographers, on the other hand, will know what they are doing and how it’s done, and their choices will be much more narrowed down – for instance, between a 50mm and a 35mm lens for street photography. So, basically, experience with doing a thing gives you enough knowledge to make more informed choices, which, on the other hand, means that you by definition have to make initial choices based on insufficient experience, and gather experience from errors. But if those errors are expensive, it might be a bad idea to make them at all; it means you’re probably going in over your head too quickly and you should revise your approach. For instance, if you think about taking up mountaineering, trying Mt. Everest or K2 as your first ascent is definitely a bad idea and you’re likely to be killed. Try something easy, and with an expert guide. Then, as you know more, increase difficulty. I’ve seen all sorts of cases where people get killed by going cave diving or climbing mountains when their experience level is insufficient for the task, and honestly, insufficient for assessing what the problems will be.
So, understand that my previous article relates to the simple choices where the worst outcome is a waste of time and energy spent in considering it. For instance, if you choose a laptop that’s not ideal for you, what’s going to be the cost of that decision? You’ll have a laptop that’s too big, too small, too slow or looks like a toy. The price of that choice is very small, and you can afford to make mistakes in order to learn. Buy based on what you know, because wasting time reading other people’s opinions without any experience isn’t going to help at that point. You need to buy something and live with it for a while. If it’s good, great. if it’s not good, it will slightly suck but you’re not going to die. It’s not like choosing a shitty car that’s going to get you killed, or choosing to go SCUBA diving in a cave. If you’re choosing headphones, the worst outcome is going to be that they will have an inferior sound, or break too easily. It’s not like you’re going hitchhiking in some wasteland and end up with your throat slit and in a ditch. So, if the cost of choosing wrong is small, treat it as a learning opportunity – if you choose wrong, based on that experience the next time you’ll know better. If, however, the cost of choosing wrong is high, you are probably pushing yourself into something too soon, and you need to learn more gradually in order to avoid really serious consequences.
Also, sometimes choices make themselves, and the way you frame the dilemma is indicative. For instance, if your question is “why would I waste all that money on a camera when a smartphone takes great pictures”, the answer is to stick to the smartphone, because if you don’t see why you should buy a system camera, you likely shouldn’t. If you know exactly what a system camera will do for you, and the question is between Canon, Nikon and Sony, the choice also makes itself – you know enough to narrow down your choice, and whichever of the three you end up choosing, it will likely be fine, and if not, you will get more experience to be able to tell why something else would be better, as a future choice.
It’s similar with other matters – if you don’t know which of the five good looking girls is right for you, the answer is that you need to find out more. Maybe none of them, and maybe the answer will become obvious when you talk to them. In any case, there’s only so much you can do at a certain level of experience, and you need to change it.
The problem remains the same with the most serious issues, like religion. If your question is why even bother with religion when there’s so many interesting things in the world, the question itself already defines what your answer is going to be. On the other hand, if the question is why waste time with the worldly things when they are ephemeral and illusory and God is the only thing that matters, the question already implies the answer.
Choice paralysis indicates that either you don’t have enough information to make the right choice, or that there isn’t a right choice to make, for instance between hazelnut and chocolate ice cream. In essence, if you don’t know which one you’d like, pick any, and the next time pick the other one. Sometimes you just have to make mistakes, and sometimes you need to make the costly ones, but agonizing over choice when you obviously don’t have any rational or experiential basis for making it doesn’t in itself improve your position.
