Lazy thinking
Lazy thinking
Smart work requires hard thinking. Without it, embrace wasteful action.
Not too long ago, I was buying a few salads at the supermarket. I got a few prepackaged salads and discarded buying one fresher, better salad. The thinking and the decision-making were simple: takeaway food is meant to be eaten within hours without an explicit expiry date, and I did not know if I would eat that salad that soon. I could have known that by thinking about my plan for the day, but I did not make that effort for a salad. That was a good-lazy approach. Do not incur decision fatigue for a salad.
Lazy is good, most often. Focus on what matters, and do not waste your time and energy on anything that is not worth it.
However, it is worth thinking for a few minutes and even hours when that would prevent throwing millions or billions down the drain. The laziness that avoids that is certainly not good. It probably happens more often and at a larger scale than we are aware of because most people are pretty bad at estimating the total size of an iceberg.
There are many reasons for the lazy thinking problem. Two are worth mentioning:
Principal-agent problem. The lack of skin in the game or alignment in the incentives is a necessary condition. Without that, Darwinism would solve the lazy thinking through selective extinction, and intelligent people with decision-making responsibilities would preventively avoid being on the wrong side of Darwinism.
Blindness to underthinking. Gambling problems arise when people are blind to their losses. Similarly, optimists are biased towards good news. The awareness of overthinking and complete disregard for underthinking biases the thinking process towards the latter. This may be a sufficient condition.
Other reasons include the need to sell your ideas, biases, poor advice, etc. Let us focus on actionable advice to avoid underthinking and overthinking. To consider:
The stakes or the range of returns you may expect from your effort.
The perfect information scenario and what you are missing from it.
The impact on the expected returns from the information you may obtain and how you may get it most cheaply. Thinking might be that way.
The cost of acquiring that information, including the opportunity cost, and how you may manage the information you do not have.
The threshold of diminishing returns and the corresponding trigger to shift from thinking to taking action.
You will probably do it wrong. After that, spend some time analyzing what went wrong and how to avoid more mistakes the next time. Eventually, you will get good at it. You may discard the entire process after the first step for some decisions because the stakes are negligible. Alternatively, you may factor in your learning for higher stakes.
In the worst-case scenario, even if you conclude that throwing money away and playing the lottery like a zombie is the best course of action, it is worth thinking about it for a few minutes before committing to the thoughtless action. Just do it.
PS: The examples mention money because it makes everything more obvious and relatable, but time is the most valuable resource that is most often wasted.
“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” — Seneca.