Another Reason Why You Should Sleep on It Before Making an Important Decision | Hacker News Reader

Another Reason Why You Should Sleep on It Before Making an Important Decision

today.duke.edu

43 pointsgnabgib17 comments

The real reason to sleep on it is that the hippocampus plays back the day's events into your long-term memory and omits the emotional context so that when you recall it, any emotion you have is fresh reaction, and recollection that you felt a certain way, but not a replay of the sharp emotions at the time the events occurred.

So sleeping on it is a way to wash the crud off the occurrence before reexamining it with a little more objectivity.

I read about this in Models of the Mind by Grace Lindsay. Great book.

I always sleep on big decisions, but I also can't think of any instance in which I changed my mind after sleeping on it

I bought solar panels from a door-to-door sales guy and signed some papers cuz he knew a friend of mine and seemed honest. I woke up the next morning with a pit in my stomach realizing, like any chump, I hadn't done basic due diligence. I found out they had horrible reviews and were too expensive, called them up, and backed out of the deal immediately.

Always sleep on big decisions.

I do it at work fairly regularly. I’m going to do this this way. Nope, I’m gonna do it this other ways.

I think the study is worthless. People aren’t able to consistently value arbitrary objects like teddy bears or lamps.

How do you explain their ability to consistently identify the same boxes (with valuable items near the top) for the non-sleepers then? I agree it's a weird description but it seems like in practice the actually valuable objects must have been clear enough.

Okay here you go nerd lol. Replace arbitrary objects like teddy bears or lamps with your digital photo collection and Plex library or something okay?

The saying “time kills all deals” seems to apply here.

Increasing the amount of time you dwell on a decision seems to decrease the amount of risk you’re willing to take.

But they were all the same, so the box they chose didn't matter. The first is just as good as the last.

So the people who made the snap judgements were no better or worse off than those who slept on it. I would say this study says close to nothing.

The article says they also valued them 10% higher, meaning they would have been willing to pay 10% more for something which gave them no actual additional value. (although I don't know if the conclusion that sleeping on it made them better at evaluation, or simply more forgetful of what made them different causing a regression to the mean, which also just happened to align with the study design)

10% in this case is $2. Hardly anything worth noting.

Like, it matters that all the boxes were of equal value. There should have been boxes of multiple values, where the apparent value was on top, in middle, on bottom, and mixed.

Then if the snap judges valued all the boxes on the tops, while the sleepers had better estimates, that would say something. But that's not what they did. They made all the boxes of equal value, had them choose. But you can't win or lose.

They could have also had people rank the boxes from most to least valuable. Which would be funny since all the boxes are equal. But they didn't do that either.

This is the sort of "soft science" study in which the results will never get repeated, but the conclusions will get repeated ad nauseum as some sort of universal truth. Like the marshmallow test, the samaritan test, the Milgram experiment, etc.

> the marshmallow test

That study was flawed? It seems really repeatable.

It was absolutely flawed!

The whole point is that they had the same value, but the perception of value changed over time.

When I'm troubleshooting something or making a big decision I definitely sleep on it. There is a lot of processing going on while it looks like I'm doing absolutely nothing. Once the frustration and the anxiety and maybe even the mourning processes, then I'm able to approach that thing better, be it a decision or a troubleshooting process, and then I'm usually able to have a way better outcome with significantly less personal stress and turmoil.

A good example I just came up with is let's say you go and reboot your network attached storage computer and when it comes back your entire array is dead. Now I am going to soften the blow a little bit by telling you that this nas of yours is the one that doesn't have anything life or death on it. Whatever is on it would just be annoying and by annoying I mean you have to redownload everything to put back into your archive and it's going to be hours or days or weeks of frustrating work. Your first impulse might be to simply buy replacement drives this exact moment so they are here tomorrow and you could get the machine back up and running and start recovering data. So you go and do that and you're frustrated but happy because the path to solving this is underway. 2 weeks later there is a sale on those exact drives that you just bought and you overspent buy a significant degree and that messes with your finances a little bit. Plus now you just have a nas with only some of the data back on it at this point. So good on you, you fixed the problem and overspent and for what? If you slept on it a little bit you might have realized that "ehhhh so what? It's just some annoying data that I am slightly inconvenienced by not having anymore. Let's reassess the situation and wait it out for a little bit.". In doing that you might have stumbled upon a sale or an alternative solution or you might just end up saving yourself the headache and the money because you processed the loss and you were okay with it.

The fact that humans are averse to change is a strong reason not to sleep on it.

Choosing status-quo has a gravity to it, and often the longer you wait the stronger the pull.

In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. If discrimination is long, it will spoil.

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