make a better choice or a better choice set?
For a long time, I believed that our ability to make good decisions is the key to success and that a bad decision could lead to regrettable outcomes. Holding onto this belief, I studied behavioral economics to learn how to be rational and make perfect decisions. But all I learned from the classes and publications is that humans are not rational by nature—or at least, we cannot be consistently rational.
Bounded rationality still means we have rationality. Given the time constraints, available information, and our cognitive capability, we make the optimal decision as much as we can. But our optimal decision last month, last year, or years ago may hurt us. We can’t say that was a bad decision. We are not the only active part in this decision. We are changing; the other parties (e.g., humans, organizations, or the physical environment) change over time, too. In this sense, things could turn out well even if we have made some seemingly suboptimal decisions. This world is fluid and fully connected. Our micro-environment, let alone the macro-environment we live in, can be shaped by other people’s decisions.
Over the years, I’ve realized that no single decision is truly once-in-a-lifetime. We can’t save or ruin our lives through a single decision. The more important part is how we handle downstream choices. There will always be a downstream, which means we always have a chance to fix things if they go wrong.
That means we still want to optimize each decision as much as possible. How do we make good decisions given our bounded rationality? There are books everywhere claiming to provide operational solutions. Some are helpful, some are not. Things are not consistent across these answers. So what should we do? We need to have some principles that can consistently anchor our decisions. Each person will have different principles based on their goals.
For small decisions, as long as they don’t harm my work or training, I will give a green light in most cases. What could possibly go wrong? For more important decisions, I try to think on a larger timescale, asking whether it can benefit me in the long run and/or whether I could handle the consequences if things went really bad. The underlying logic of my decision principles is, “preserve my energy, do not fight unnecessary fights.” Even if I have those principles and logic, I still have moments where I make decisions that completely violate them. I choose to accept that we are human and unintentionally create surprise.
But in recent years, I’ve been thinking about “decision” one step further back. What does it mean to have to make a decision? It means a problem or opportunity is waiting for our answer. Or, more simply, there is a choice set for us to pick from. That means the choice set determines what kind of choice we can make. Not everyone is given the same choice set.
Think about a top student from Rutgers University and a top student from Princeton University. Same major, same cohort. Will they ever have the same choice set during their four college years? I use the university as an example, but throughout our lives, we are surrounded by different micro-environments. We don’t get the same set of choices.
One could argue that those micro-environments also result from upstream choices. One could say someone worked hard to land at Princeton rather than Rutgers. Not really. Some people were born in a small town in Africa. Some were born in California in the US. Our ethnicity, race, gender, culture, personality, and genetic traits—none of those were our choices. Not all of us were offered the same choice set or faced the same challenges. Some choice sets are better. Some challenges are easier. We must recognize that a societal structure is at play beyond the individual level. We are embedded in this structure. Whatever we do carries the stamp of this structure and this era.
That doesn’t mean everything is determined and we can’t do anything as individuals. I believe that we, as humans, have a lot of agency. We can do a lot of things, and we can do hard things. However, we can achieve more by changing our local environment (who we work with, and where) rather than optimizing single decisions. Once we have a better choice set, each choice/decision could bring us to a better position. We want meaningful, challenging decisions, not hard, exhaustive ones.
It is helpful to think at multiple levels. We should believe in our agency as individuals, but also acknowledge the affordances of our environment.
On Saturday, a friend (not Asian) gave me The Art of War. “Tzu” is an honorific name given to people after death. “Sun” is a family name. Sun Tzu’s original name was Sun Wu. Life is not a war in a literal sense, but war is a metaphor. Humans love using metaphors—they make us sound witty and make persuasion easier and more engaging. But most of the time, metaphors are used incorrectly. People use them out of convenience, not because of true logical similarity, since it’s hard to see through the surface and identify the shared nature of two things.
Life is too broad a concept to be just one thing. Still, we often say life is a battlefield, where we battle with ourselves or those around us. And sometimes, when battle comes, we need strategies. This book is not only about how to conduct war. It has sections on estimates, waging war, offensive strategy, dispositions, energy, strengths and weaknesses, maneuvering, the nine variables, marches, terrain, the nine varieties of ground, attack by fire, and the employment of secret agents.
Some of those sections made me reflect on my jiujitsu rolls, while others made me think about being both a better leader and a team player. For example, the book lists characteristics that make a good leader. In real life, we are both team players and leaders. We are team players in our labs, where our advisors are the leaders. However, our advisors are also team players in our work and life, where we are the leaders. They need us to achieve their goals, and we need them to fulfill ours.
If we could adequately translate the principles from The Art of War into real life, we could turn disadvantages into advantages and win ourselves a better choice set. However, such a translation is difficult, and we must understand both sides.