People may know the best decision and not make it: study
medicalxpress.com
medicalxpress.com
The multi-armed bandit problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit) is a theoretical simplification of this concept.
Thank you!
In summary, it took the form of a simple game, for which many players deduced the optimal strategy. They then modified its behavior, without notifying the subjects, so that the optimal strategy remained the same, but was less successful, and many players strayed from the optimal behavior. So were they exploring? Had they simply lost confidence in their earlier assumptions about how the game worked? We don't know why they strayed, because "while the answer to that is beyond the scope of this study, Krajbich said, it likely takes a lot of mental energy and planning to always make decisions based on your knowledge of the environment."
Notice, in that quote, the willingness to speculate about a cause despite an experimental design that could not deliver evidence on the issue... (To be fair, I probably would not have noticed that inconsistency if Krajbich had picked a putative explanation that I speculate is more probable.)
Then you also have the opportunity cost of what you choose to optimize. Perhaps making sub-optimal choices is fine in areas that aren't important to you for whatever reason. You have to make choices all day, you don't have enough time or energy to optimize all of them. If you want to succeed in whatever your highest priority goals are, then I'd suggest that you should only bother to optimize things that are actually going to help you achieve them. Devoting significant effort to optimizing things that don't matter is usually called bike-shedding, and I think a lot of us would have experienced how that can come at the expense of things that actually matter.
I'd also suggest that focusing on overly narrow set of factors can skew the results. The author talked about commute routes, and I know that my usual commute route is sub-optimal from a time perspective. I know there are routes that can give me 5-10 minutes in time. But I usually don't choose them, because I'm usually not optimizing for time on my commute. After a days work, I'll usually prefer to take the slow mindless crawl down the freeway, over the 20-left-turn route that gets me home some inconsequential amount of time faster.
Jokes aside, the article starts with the assumption that there's an absolute "best" result, and doesn't really consider that "best" is relative to your value system.
If you choose to take the slower route home, maybe you just find it less frustrating. If you don't choose the optimal game strategy, maybe you just want the thrill of a big win because you didn't care if you lost.
And even if you do have the same values as the article assumes, all of that stuff about humans being bad predictors and naturally being inclined to gambler's fallacy and such is nothing new.
I'm pretty sure the article is grounded in a utilitarian framework where "best" means "the thing that gets you the most of what you personally want."
Which is still naive, as if the same person can't/won't want conflicting things...
But this is actually totally beside the point of the article, which is that we’re bad at recognizing small differences in probability and over weight recent experience. The headline is misleading, it isn’t really about deliberately making bad choices. When the winning pattern was clear players chose it more often, and when it was less apparent they chose it less often.
In the real world, true randomness is kind of unusual. There's usually some kind of spatial or temporal autocorrelation.
So something might change in a quasi-random way, but it often doesn't just return to "normal" immediately. There's often something continuing (like an antagonist, or some environmental variable that decays over time, but slowly).
So these random "blips" do happen in reality, but they're not normal. What's more normal is for there to be changes, and for those changes to be somewhat, but not completely, stable with some decay. They might not decay at all.
The AI's often end up giving that pathway a try a few more times before giving up on it.
Also, it’s a black box. You try something and it gives you the best rewards. You try it again and it works again! Then it fails. Your immediate reaction is not “let’s run a long experiment and see what the p value is”, your reaction is “I guess it’s random”
For example, you might have prior experience that your gut is more reliable than your conscious thinking.
Or in the example of Main Street and Spruce Street, the subject might have taken the new experience that the Spruce Street route was faster than expected to wonder whether they _really_ know that Main Street is usually the better route.
Anyway. If you liked this article, you may be interested in looking up experimental philosophy or epistemology.
Successful sportsman have always been comfortable with a small margin of advantage. Leagues and ladder tables put teams of similar ability together in match-ups, large differences are uncommon and seen as unsporting if too frequent.
People build their own structures for dealing with work and life, there's no structure you can bring to a point & click symbol matching game that would help inside the rules of the test. You could escape the test environment and reverse engineer the code in real life, or accelerate the test environment with a clicking bot and data-log the patterns. You could bring knowledge and grokked intuition from another field into a complex task for an advantage, but none of that here. Exploring alternative hypothesis in real life is useful because there is infinite (though diminishing returns) in adding to a better work skill or structure.
I don't know what value people are expected to get out of this article.
Mouse tracking reveals structure knowledge in the absence of model-based choice
Link to the article:
I'd love to live...have wanted to the entire time...but people can only take so much. I had one great chance a couple years ago, only one in all this time, and more health issues and my fear of suffering more caused me to lose that. There isn't enough help...people just take more and ignore and throw platitudes. What all of this life has taught me is 99% of people are in it entirely for themselves and how I lived and what I believed in was naive and stupid. So the best decision for me now is to get out of this shit world but I am not even allowed to do that. Just more nonsense and symptom covering...never root cause solutions. There is no lifeline...no support...just rationalization and calculus devaluing my life. "Best decisions".
Suicide isn't the answer. As long as you're breathing there's hope.
And yeah, 99% of everything is crap, including, unfortunately, most people. But the stuff and people that aren't crap are worth the slog, even if it doesn't seem like it now.
Also, you're going to die anyway, it's the one thing the Universe gives you for free, the moment you're born. In the meantime, you've got an entire human life to use: you can think, talk, move around a little (I'm guessing), eh? Sure, it's painful and dirty and there's always some kind of snot or ooze involved in everything, goddamnit, but it's still a crazy cool thing to be. hang in there! You're worth it!
"Suicide isn't the answer" is the sort of platitude I mean. It is an answer. It solves the problems I am suffering. I am so tired of people who haven't slogged anywhere near as painfully and as long as I have telling me what is worth it or what I HAVE to do. People who don't understand at all what it's like or try and relate their relatively smaller issues or survivable resources and health to "knowing suffering". Everything you have said is to reinforce your own beliefs and comforts. It doesn't help me at all. Lest I sound ungrateful...I appreciate people trying...but it doesn't work or help and people and systems won't do what is required. My country has decided social systems are bad and wrong and denied me that assistance and Maslow's basic needs. I know I am worth it. I didn't cause any of this. I am a victim and that's a dirty word. Being angry about it is "wrong". Nobody arrives where I am because they have choices. It's a last desperate jump so the fire doesn't burn you up...even though you know you will fall and splat...to paraphrase DFW.
I'm happy to take the help to live...it's not there. It's "entitled" of me. It's me not "trying hard enough" whilst I am burning up. Everyone for themselves with the exception of a tiny few...and I've not had enough of those people in my life since this happened to me.
Yes there are many people as bad or sadly even worse off than me. That doesn't lift or make me feel any better...it makes me feel bad for them and hate the system even more. I also don't have the energy or health to be much of a supporter when I need to be supported. Drowning guy isn't the person to advocate for water safety...he is trying not to go totally under. I do give what I can of myself to a couple close people and it's already too much for me. I am not scared to help...I don't have any resources to help and am sinking myself.
I wouldn't know. I haven't been as far as you on the path.
He explained it this way. He'd get a desire to do or say something and it would grab his attention and gnaw at him and distract him until it was released. He'd rather do the dumb thing and deal with the consequences than live with that gnawing feeling.
Everyone, rightly, thought he was an asshole.
I think that this is an example of "Denominator Neglect" I read about in the book "The Organized Mind", by Levetin. There is a section about organized decision making for complicated decisions. Medical decisions is in this group. At the same time, for most uncomplicated decisions, his advice is just to be more decisive.
Still, here are the basic steps that he outlined, I believe (from memory...): 1) Arm yourself with the best possible statistics about your procedure (things like NNT are good to know). 2) Understand your own biases. 3) Understand your own tolerance for regret. If a low chance of failure (5% or so) happens, can you ignore outcome bias? 4) If you still can't make up your mind, talk to your friends and family about your core values.
He also talks about how to converse with your doctor, understanding the incredible quality of knowledge that they have, while understanding some of the gaps that they might have.
I strongly recommend this book.
As in other posts here, it’s not hard to find good explanations for this observation.
If you just drove a route yesterday, you remember it best and maybe that is why you chose it again, not because of some "evil human bias"?
Taking an unfamiliar route takes more cognitive energy even through it may get me to my destination sooner. Sometimes I can't be bothered.
"When faced with a decision, people may know which choice gives them the best chance of success, but still take the other option."
THIS CAN BE RATIONAL.
"Best chance of success" ignores weightings.
Say Spruce St. is slower than Main St. by 2 mins on a normal day. And Main St. had a 90-min delay yesterday. If there is even a 3% chance that Main St. has a similar delay today, it is smarter to take Spruce St.; even though Main St. has the best "chance" of success (97% of the time you will get home faster with Main St.).
Maybe the actual study does not make this mistake, but the wording of the article certainly does.
This idea is so old that it goes back at least as far as to the ancient greeks. They even had a name for it, they called this concept "Akrasia".
Only it's not natural selection, more like preprogrammed cell death happening at the macro level. Similar to ants sacrificing themselves for the queen.
People are not rhesus monkeys.
Humans are deeply irrational, we make decisions mostly based on our emotions which are heavily influenced by our social environment.
Visiting a doctor/ER when sick is usually the best decision, not these days.
Same for obvious choices: sit and look at TV or walk around the neighborhood. I know some places I would not walk around.
Watch 1 hour TV;
Walk for 1 hour;