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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this especially for inconclusive situations, when you need to make a call and you're not 100% (or even 90%) sure what's the right choice. These drain my energy more than anything. Combination of a need for prolonged high mental alertness and hight stress levels caused by uncertain outcome just burns through you. On the other hand some people, like gamblers, get an ultimate kick out of this.

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I think, more than the outcome, it's the window of uncertainty that burns through you. Gamblers get a kick because the uncertainty window is fairly short. I'd bet that they'll flip when faced with an extremely long uncertainty window, like closing a corporate sales deal, or waiting for a job offer.

I'm guessing this must also have quite an effect on people who find themselves charged with a crime or even a civil claim. The snail's pace of most proceedings could keep you in a very uncertain situation for many months. Can't be mentally healthy, particularly considering the possibly severe negative outcome.

With something like a job offer, if you don't get the job you're no worse off than you were before. There's really only an upside potential. That has got to be less stressful.

As another guess at the difference gamblers feel: another aspect to the situation is whether the potential outcomes include a large reward, or if the best outcome is just 'less bad'.

A lot of times in the engineering situation we have to make these critical decisions which have a large impact on how the rest of some project goes. But the attitude generally seems to be about mitigating negative consequences, and not really hoping for or working toward some very positive outcome.

There is a similar analog in a lot of human behavior. Part of how I characterize it to myself is whether I feel that I'm, "digging myself out of a hole" or just striving for the highest gain possible (while lower gain is also fine). They two create vastly different experiences, the latter being far more positive.

I think you're right about that. I wonder if the best ways to avoid burnout, is to work on how you handle specifically these decision situations.

In other words, finding a way to deal with low certainty situations might be key, compared to just dealing with huge amounts of rote work.

This is a really interesting point. How would you approach this?

Some things that work for me:

- Cultivating a slight bias for making a decision; I remind myself that sometimes any decision is way better than no decision. Especially when a) time is a factor, b) managing people who want leadership.

- Prune the decision tree. When no option seems good, I switch modes and look for decisions that seem bad. Like SATs: rule out the bad answers and then guess.

- Calibrate expectations of information. Like Poker: Care about (and attach judgement mostly to) making the right call given the cards on the table, as opposed to winning any one pot.

When I find myself with a tough decision, I remind myself that it's tough for a reason: either the available options are similarly good, or similarly bad, or both. Therefore, the choice between them is not likely actually all that important. In poker you can bet the odds and be sure that there is a correct decision either way. In life you're probably lucky if that's true; it seems like the black swans are prevalent enough to sink almost any strategy.

There is a very rich man (forgot the name) who is making big decisions like this:

  * make a list of pros and cons
  * give each item an importance score from 0 to 10
  * if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons: do it

I believe you can do this for small decisions as well, without creating a list. Because most of the time you have a sense about the pros being twice as valuable as the cons.

Edit: Sorry, this comment is a little unrelated because the parent talked about making a choice. My comment is more about 'should I progress'.

> if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons

This is very obvious situation. But what if sum is not twice larger? Or if you are not confident in your importance score? This is where game becomes harder.

I wonder if energy drain is caused more by uncertain outcome or by brain working hard to find arguments to make decision.

Yup as the gp described, once you've made a decision the energy involved is all in implementation (and wasted worries). But actually exploring possibilities requires imaginging all angles and consequences as if they were real... at the same time. Can be very energetically consuming.

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