#158: Lesser-Evilism, T-DODAR & the Falsification Ratio
3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Making Tough Decisions
I. Lesser-Evilism
Imagine the following purely speculative hypothetical problem: You live in a democracy and are asked to cast your vote. Who are you going to vote for? Unqualified deranged candidate no.1, unqualified demented candidate no. 2, or the third semi-qualified lunatic with no chance of winning? It’s kind of obvious, but Lesser-Evilism guides you to pick the least terrible of all terrible options. Or as Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza put it:
According to the guidance of reason, of two things which are good, we shall follow the greater good, and of two evils, follow the less.
—Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Vote for the person you think will cause the least harm. Granted, that’ll probably still be a tough decision to make.
II. T-DODAR
In an emergency, airline pilots have to make life-saving decisions fast. Luckily, they have decision-making tools to assist them. One of the most prominent ones is T-DODAR.
The acronym stands for Diagnose, Options, Decide, Assign Tasks and Review. The T? Stands for Time. As a pilot, you’d first estimate how much time you can allocate to conducting the DODAR. Because there’s no point in launching into a lengthy diagnosis, considering options and weighing decisions if, by the time you assign tasks to other crewmembers, the plane has already hit the ground.
But even when you only have minutes to make the right call and will be held accountable for it afterwards, a standardised tool is better than just winging it. (Pun intended, I apologise.) For more details, check out my article on DODAR: How to Think Like a Pilot (Facing an Emergency).
III. Falsification Ratio
The game of kings teaches many lessons to the intrepid thinker and decision-maker. Here’s one writer Nabeel S. Qureshi highlighted on his Substack: the Falsification Ratio.
The lesson I found the most striking is this: there’s a direct correlation between how skilled you are as a chess player, and how much time you spend falsifying your ideas. The authors find that grandmasters spend longer falsifying their idea for a move than they do coming up with the move in the first place, whereas amateur players tend to identify a solution and then play it shortly after without trying their hardest to falsify it first. (Often amateurs, find reasons for playing the move — ‘hope chess’.)
Call this the ‘falsification ratio’: the ratio of time you spend trying to falsify your idea to the time you took coming up with it in the first place. For grandmasters, this is 4:1 — they’ll spend 1 minute finding the right move, and another 4 minutes trying to falsify it, whereas for amateurs this is something like 0.5:1 — 1 minute finding the move, 30 seconds making a cursory effort to falsify it.—Nabeel S. Qureshi, Notes on Puzzles
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Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com
P.S.: My latest essay on The Diderot Effect: How to Avoid Overconsumption is now live.