Related to: Half-assing it with everything you've got; Wasted motion; Say it Loud.
Once upon a time (true story), I was on my way to a hotel in a new city. I knew the hotel was many miles down this long, branchless road. So I drove for a long while.
After a while, I began to worry I had passed the hotel.
So, instead of proceeding at 60 miles per hour the way I had been, I continued in the same direction for several more minutes at 30 miles per hour, wondering if I should keep going or turn around.
- I wasn't sure if I was a good enough writer to write a given doc myself, or if I should try to outsource it. So, I sat there kind-of-writing it while also fretting about whether the task was correct.
- (Solution: Take a minute out to think through heuristics. Then, either: (1) write the post at full speed; or (2) try to outsource it; or (3) write full force for some fixed time period, and then pause and evaluate.)
- I wasn't sure (back in early 2012) that CFAR was worthwhile. So, I kind-of worked on it.
- An old friend came to my door unexpectedly, and I was tempted to hang out with her, but I also thought I should finish my work. So I kind-of hung out with her while feeling bad and distracted about my work.
- A friend of mine, when teaching me math, seems to mumble specifically those words that he doesn't expect me to understand (in a sort of compromise between saying them and not saying them)...
- Duncan reports that novice Parkour students are unable to safely undertake certain sorts of jumps, because they risk aborting the move mid-stream, after the actual last safe stopping point (apparently kind-of-attempting these jumps is more dangerous than either attempting, or not attempting the jumps)
- It is said that start-up founders need to be irrationally certain that their startup will succeed, lest they be unable to do more than kind-of work on it...
Nah... in the hotel example, you slow down as to not maximize your mistake if you've made one. If you have doubts, they are probably justified enough to do something to examine the evidence while minimizing the fallout.
Before you set out on the trip, you'd likely have checked some map and had an idea of how far to travel along the road the hotel is located on. You'd say, "Oh. It's 17.8 miles after I turn onto highway 99. Got it."
Then, you turn onto highway 99, but you'd be thinking about something other than "17.8 miles to go". You'd be thinking about the big meeting you had the next day, or the cramp in your leg, or your ex-girlfriend, etc. So x miles would pass, and you'd lose track of what the value of x was.
At this point, you're right that driving full speed either forward or back would optimize your arrival time IF you guess right. But during the time you are trying to make a decision, it makes rational sense to slow your speed a bit and think. (30 mph seems excessive in a 60mph zone)
You probably didn't pass the hotel yet. I'd say it's north of 50% probability. While you were daydreaming about the big meeting and your ex, you weren't completely distracted from the task of finding your hotel—you were just daydreaming, not actually dreaming. Add this to the fact you'd have some reasonable idea of how many miles you'd traveled since turning onto hwy 99, and it's a 50.1%+ chance you didn't miss your hotel yet.
Slowing down for a minute is certainly preferable to just turning around the moment you have a doubt. It's also better than just proceeding through your doubts at the same speed and making the problem worse.
Slowing down gives you a chance to look around and check for clues that you may have missed, or not yet arrived at the hotel. It allows you to think and reason through the evidence. Did you already pass a commercial district and now you are in the rural boonies? Or have you not yet seen an area where a hotel might be?
The other examples don't seem to fit the first analogy that well. If the point is "it's rational to commit to one thing since half-assing two things tends not to work" then I agree, but it's not terribly novel stuff. (65 upvotes? Really?)