From Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions: Don’t always consider all your options. Don’t necessarily go for the outcome that seems best every time. Make a mess on occasion. Travel light. Let things wait. Trust your instincts and don’t think too long. Relax. Toss a coin … to thine own self be true. Our judgments betray our expectations, and our expectations betray our experience. What we project about the future reveals a lot — about the world we live in and about our own past. Tackling real-world tasks requires being comfortable with chance, trading off time with accuracy, and using approximations. There’s a wisdom to deliberately thinking less. Giving yourself more time to decide about something does not necessarily mean that you’ll make a better decision. But it does guarantee that you’ll end up considering more factors, more hypotheticals, more pros and cons, and thus risk overfitting. The greater the uncertainty, the bigger the gap between what you can ...
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