Choice Complexity Quotes

Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide.

If decisions were a choice between alternatives, decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.

Of two evils, choose the more interesting.

But why must choices always lie along a linear spectrum with two poles instead of say among a sphere of possibilities

We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let's give it a try.

Once the options increase, settling on one becomes harder.

There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.

I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.

There are times when the presence of more choices can make us choose things that are not good for us. For me the clearest example is that the more retirement fund options a person has, the less likely they are to save for their old age.

So most of the time when we are confronted by more, rather than a few, choices we're often novices and so we don't really know how to differentiate these various options.