Decisions are processes, not events

Coffeetime?

Me: Man, this coffee is great…wait, what time is it?
Her: (checking watch) 3:23?
Me: Dammit!

When we were out in Long Island, the Firecracker and I chatted about being parents, which we usually do.

The most important thing for me, as a parent, is to teach the kid how to think critically think.

Again, how to think, not what to think.

The recent Titanic sub disaster made me think a lot about smart people making terrible decisions.

James Cameron, the director of the film Titanic – and an amateur sub enthusiast himself – said that he knew exactly what happened to the sub before alla the details were even out.

It’s easy to call the CEO’s decisions things like stupid and moronic but it’s a lot more complex, and dangerous, than that.

Because people seem to look at decisions like singular events:

• • • I decided to go to law school.
    • I decided to have waffles for brekkie.

But they’re not that at all: All decisions are the cumulation of processes in our heads:

• • • I decided to go to law school because my dad wanted me to and I didn’t feel I was ready to stop learning yet. And each of those two reasons had many reasons beneath that; my dad felt that lawyers and doctors were the best professions that two children of immigrants could have. Plus, I spent my life alone with books, so I wanted to find a way to continue that.
    • I do occasionally have waffles for breakfast, but only when I haven’t had carbs in a while so I’m in a relative deficit of carbs and can “afford,” to splurge on something like waffles. But if I do that, I then have to be in the gym for two consecutive days.

Sometimes these processes happen in the blink of an eye, sometimes, these decisions take weeks, months, or even years to fully happen.

The CEO most likely made a series of smaller poor decisions based on various cognitive biases that he had – the worst decision being to use carbon fiber for the hull instead of metal – ultimately resulting in the disaster.

What I’m hoping to give this kid are good tools to process each step of any decision as best as he can.

Which is not, at all, to say that it’s or I’m perfect.

I’ve made some terrible decisions in life; decisions that I still ruminate on late in the night when I can’t sleep.

And I try to figure out which tool I ignored, disregarded, or am simply missing.

For example, I have a rule where I never have coffee/caffeine after 3PM.

But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve disregarded that rule for one reason or another – societal pressure, sunk cost bias, confirmation bias, optimism bias, overconfidence, etc – with disastrous results.

My son will make bad decisions in life. That’s what people do and that’s part of how we learn.

I just hope that (a) they’re not decisions that he can’t change later on and (b) he continually makes more good decisions than bad ones, and (c) he gets better at making good decisions as he ages.

I’m still working on alla that myself.

Me: I guess I’ll just toss it. Seems like such a waste.
Her: Do you want to be up all night?
Me: (sigh) Fair. What a shame…

Location: bed, waiting until noon to leave
Mood: headachy
Music: Feel the heat increase and my mind’s racing (Spotify)
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