i think this account is missing something important. i claim that when someone is dithering, there is actually some part of them that has an argument for not doing the thing. that argument may or may not be a good one. but it is hard to verbalize (or even admit to themself) for some reason - for example, explicitly considering the argument may require admitting something unseemly, or confronting a deeply held fear. although oftentimes the explicit argument is more correct than the implicit one, i’ve personally had instances where i introspected on my dithering and realized that my implicit argument had a good point and ultimately not doing the thing was the right choice.
a corollary: the empathetic thing to do when someone is going through this is to realize that their inability to verbalize reasons against doing the thing doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have such reasons, and to help them work through their internal conflict.
Thanks for giving your own example here.
Of course it's worth asking whether, when you have lots of reasons to do a thing, but your "revealed preference" is apparently not to, whether you have some unconscious but good case against doing the thing. I've found that to be the case surprisingly rarely; between explicit & revealed preferences i expect explicit preferences "should" win more often than not.
I'm reminded of this 80,000 Hours article about making major life decisions.
One of my favourite studies ever is ‘Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness’ by economist Steven Levitt of ‘Freakonomics’.
Levitt collected tens of thousands of people who were deeply unsure whether to make a big change in their life. After offering some advice on how to make hard choices, those who remained truly undecided were given the chance to use a flip of a coin to settle the issue. 22,500 did so. Levitt then followed up two and six months later to ask people whether they had actually made the change, and how happy they were out of 10.
The causal effect of quitting a job is estimated to be a gain of 5.2 happiness points out of 10, and breaking up as a gain of 2.7 out of 10! This is the kind of welfare jump you might expect if you moved from one of the least happy countries in the world to one of the happiest, though presumably these effects would fade over time.
I suspect the effect is less about change being generally good and more about inertia being generally bad. It's hard to commit to major life changes, even when we expect them to be positive, just because humans are risk-averse by nature. I'd also be willing to bet that many of those people would've quit their jobs or broken up with their partners sometime within the next year anyway — it's just that the coin flip accelerated the process and forced them to stop dithering.
My understanding of ”Analysis Paralysis” is it originally meant inability to resolve a decision with equifinal outcomes. A manager actually does all the correct multi-factor optimizations, correctly applies values and there’s just no tie breaker.
My guess when this happens is that it sticks out in the brain as “that can’t be right. It just can’t not matter at all if we make play dough or oven mitts.” It’s pretty counterintuitive (at least to many) that such situations could really exist. So the stuckness probably comes from assuming one’s analysis is wrong and looking for the missed decision factor.
An empathetic and hopefully useful set of steps might be try to help the person spot deciding facts they haven’t identified. But if neither you nor they can come up with anything, suggest “Maybe it’s as likely to be a great decision either way. How about a coin flip?”
I listened to all of this carefully, expecting to agree.
First, I do agree that if someone is just overcoming momentum to make a pretty clearly good change, it's good to help them do that faster.
But what I mostly found seemed to be "don't think about your major decisions carefully; just do what intuitively draws you".
People trying to analyze what they should do, even when they are strongly emotionally drawn to one alternative, are being heroically rational. You are telling them not to bother, possibly because them doing so at you bothers you.
I can't imagine worse advice.
You seem to be conflating "wants to do this" with "should do this". You are admirably honest about thinking people should "follow their heart".
This is the opposite of the rationalist project.
Your heart (intuition) is a valuable source of evidence. That evidence must be weighed by your brain (analysis/rational/system 2 mind).
I think you're swayed by how irritating you find it when people ask you what they should do when they obviously already like one alternative better. I hope you and everyone with a similar level of annoyance will say "you should go talk to Claude (or someone else) about the pros and cons" rather than saying "oh just go do whatever you feel like instead of bothering me".
Sure Follow Your Heart if everything else is equal.
It never is equal. That's what rationality is for.
Humans make terrible decisions when they follow their hearts without consulting our heads. When those decisions are large, even small gains from much painful (to them and their friends) cognitive effort is worthwhil.
Here's a relevant massive research piece, which I've agreeably not titled "How humans are idiots and intuition betrays us"
I think a lot of people don't realize just how impermanent things are, and how reversible most decisions are. Especially young people, who've spent most of their lives being told to be serious and think for the long-term and protect their permanent record, and the next big decision will determine the path of the rest of their lives. Usually by well-meaning parents or authority figures who imply that their recommendation is the only one that will lead to happiness.
And dithering is the natural response when responsibility/agency hasn't internalized. It's not a question of intellectually failing to list the cons and get an EV, it's a question of being uncomfortable at causing a big change without an authority to share in the blame.
My approach as an advisor differs based on who it is, but I often point out 2 things:
- This decision isn't actually permanent. It may be big and impactful, but it's one of dozens you'll make, at least some of which you'll have to change later.
- STAYING is also a decision you're responsible for. "take no action" is a choice, and often is more impactful in a negative direction than even a change that goes wrong. Your responsibility is to all of your future experiences, not just to your active motions.
I see someone give a list of plausible reasons in favor of doing the thing, and a visible pull towards doing the thing, and there’s literally nothing pointing in the opposite direction. I guess they’re just looking for permission to do it, or seeking validation, or waiting for a sign for the universe that it’s time. There are no actual obstacles! They just don’t feel “sure” yet.
Sounds like a generalised sense of fear/anxiety about there being something not yet considered that implies the plan will go wrong. Which can't be articulated as a specific weighed factor because they don't know what it might be, because they lack the life experience to confidently enumerate all the things that can happen. Even with assurances from a competent adult, that uncertainty can be hard to push past.
Contrast that against the opposite mistake, of one who throws themself confidently into an uncontrolled situation, because they've already considered all three ways they can possibly imagine it going wrong, and developed a strategy that (they think) accounts for all of them. Who then gets utterly blindsided by "actually it's more complicated than you thought", or "actually there are more requirements than that", or "turns out that thing you did was illegal".
What is happening, I think, is that the other side is not expressed when the person is talking to you. It is also possible that the person cannot properly verbalise the other side. Neither means that the other side doesn't actually exist.
A typical mistake that psychotherapists are taught to avoid early on is to imagine that they are seeing the whole person when a client is passionately telling them how they can't be with their spouse, how they can't bear their job, etc. A conflict can't exist if there is only one side to it.
And of course, being in such a conflict (or empathising with it) can be frustrating and unattractive.
And again, in conversations that fit this pattern, what I notice is that everything the person expresses indicates they want to make this change. They only say positive things about it. They seem eager and hopeful. They give reasons in favor of doing it, and reasons against not doing it.
A somewhat smaller factor in the psychology of this I believe is not quite mentioned by the previous comments (not-yet-verbalized ways in which things could go wrong, general anxiety about something not yet being considered) is that from the speaker's perspective, they have a plan laid in front of them with nothing but apparent upsides, which leads to a natural sense of suspicion. For example, if somebody saw an advertised service that touted nothing but benefits, one would naturally look for the "catch" - some factor showing how the service wasn't what it was presented to be. Likewise, in the case of a personal choice that seems entirely positive, perhaps the speaker feels as though there should be a catch to their plan. And, they may experience discomfort from not knowing what it may be.
Several times now, I have listened to someone, usually younger than me, debating a big decision, and (explicitly or implicitly), looking for advice, in a certain way that follows a pattern.
In the prototypical case, this is a pretty normal kind of decision that people make all the time — whether to quit a job, get married, move to a new city, start a company, have a kid, etc. A major life change, but not a super unusual or inherently questionable proposition.
And again, in conversations that fit this pattern, what I notice is that everything the person expresses indicates they want to make this change. They only say positive things about it. They seem eager and hopeful. They give reasons in favor of doing it, and reasons against not doing it.
But they have not, themselves, noticed that they want to do it. They haven’t picked up on what they sound like from the outside, which is blazingly obvious even to someone who’s just met them.
So, pretty much every time, I say “Sounds like you really want to do this! You should go for it!”
And then they’re often like “but I’m not suuuuure.” And I have to kind of egg them on and tell them they should totally do the thing.
Why do I do this?
The thing is, I’m not a fortune-teller. I actually have no idea, objectively, if some person I’ve never met would make a good spouse for you. Or if quitting your job will work out well for you. In a few cases I have experience in a loosely analogous situation that I’m drawing from, but mostly I’m clueless. You know way more about your own life than I do. I only have one piece of information that you don’t — how you look and sound to me, as we’re having this conversation.
And, in a fair number of cases, you guys look and sound like you really want to do a thing, and are just hesitating for no good reason that you can think of.
This is dithering.
It’s not really doubt. If you seriously doubted whether this was a good decision, you’d be looking for information that could go either way. You’d be interested in learning how it might go wrong, or you might be weighing reasons to do the thing against reasons not to do it.
But often that’s not what I see. I see someone give a list of plausible reasons in favor of doing the thing, and a visible pull towards doing the thing, and there’s literally nothing pointing in the opposite direction. I guess they’re just looking for permission to do it, or seeking validation, or waiting for a sign for the universe that it’s time. There are no actual obstacles! They just don’t feel “sure” yet.
And dithering looks quite unattractive from the outside. It’s almost an irresistible compulsion to try to get someone over this hesitant phase, this mode where they’re obviously restraining themselves from what is obviously their natural impulse, and get them to Make A Decision Already.
You want to do the thing. You think doing the thing is the right move. I can’t promise you that you’re right! But I do have a sort of faith that people can’t, in practice, do much better than following their own integrated judgment and desire.
To put it more superstitiously, even if it is a bad move, it’s a bad move that you kind of “have to make”. It’s a necessary part of how your life must unfold, given that you are you.
And to put it less superstitiously, it’s important for development, learning, human flourishing, all that stuff, to move forward with your life, to take on the “natural” next challenge or opportunity that “advances the plot” and will require you to learn and change. You are not going to get out of life 100% unscathed; nobody is wholly untouched by regret or adversity. So you might as well make the decision you want to make.
In particular, I far more often see young people underrate experimentation than overrate it. And this makes sense; if you’ve had very few life experiences thus far, it’s easy to imagine “this is basically How The World Is; if I make a change in my life it probably won’t get any better than this.” Whereas actually, you have tried almost nothing yet and anything you’re dissatisfied with is probably fixable if you change something about the basic conditions of your life. (Like: where you live, what you work on, what your daily routine is like, who your close relationships are with, what medical interventions you’ve tried, etc.) I don’t want to downplay adversity that’s beyond people’s control, but in my observation “if you’re unhappy, make a change, no really, actually switch up what you’re doing and try something you’ve never tried before” isn’t just good advice for people with charmed lives — it can also work out well for people who have quite genuine problems.
Now, while I do genuinely think “don’t dither” is good advice, it’s admittedly a bit contaminated by the self-interest of the advice-giver; dithering just provokes so much impatience that we can’t resist telling you to get over it.
The thing is, dithering is unattractive because it’s tediously predictable from the outside. From the inside, as you yearn to do X but hesitate, there’s intense and meaningful tension; from the outside, it’s painfully boring watching someone slowly try to psych themselves up to do something that they’ve already on some level “decided” to do. It’s also awkward to watch someone try to hide a part of themselves that you can clearly see from the outside. The “full-fledged”, brazen version of almost any personality or disposition is more appealing than an incoherent, weak attempt to stifle it.1 Being yourself really is more charming than trying to be anyone else.2
Which is, itself, another reason not to dither!
Now, to some extent, it’s easier said than done. There’s a process you have to go through to make a decision, and if you can’t do it any faster than you’re doing it, then you just have to go at your own pace. But using “skip to the end” as a mantra can sometimes be helpful. If you get to the point where you actively prefer getting to the point quickly and Moving Right Along, rather than idealizing indecision as some sort of prolonged “innocence” that can keep you from being tarnished by Time; if you can empathize with the outside perspective that finds your dithering a bit annoying and the ineluctable desires of your heart entirely lovable; then you can sometimes hurry it up a little bit.
Balancing is not stifling. Stifling is when you try to not be so X. Balancing is what happens when you’re all the way X, and you actually experience the consequences of that, and learn to mix in a little not-X.
I disagree with people who think authenticity is a meaningless concept. To me, it has a clear and concrete meaning; when you feel a fire burning in your chest, when you’re driven by your “heart’s desire” in that way, that’s your Authentic Self (TM). There is practically zero ambiguity about whether you are “heartfelt” or not, at any given moment. And I do generally believe in Following One’s Heart, all else being equal.