I think you (and people in similar situations) would benefit more by studying psychology than abstract rationality and decision theory. You are a human, with a particular emotional experience of the world. As such, you deserve your own sympathy and understanding.
To elaborate on that just a little: the human brain uses massively parallel processing, and is relatively limited in using serial algorithms. So a fifty-item list of criteria is great for an algorithm that makes decisions, but intractable for a human brain. Intuition (parallel processing) and logic must be used to check and balance each other.
Second, emotions and value judgments are intrinsic to human brain operation. Humans are terribly vulnerable to confirmation bias, because the associative nature of thinking makes it easy to think of ways to find evidence for our current representation/thought/hypothesis, and not evidence against it.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of a good rationalist’s guide to psychology.
I think you (and people in similar situations) would benefit more by studying psychology than abstract rationality and decision theory. You are a human, with a particular emotional experience of the world. As such, you deserve your own sympathy and understanding.
To elaborate on that just a little: the human brain uses massively parallel processing, and is relatively limited in using serial algorithms. So a fifty-item list of criteria is great for an algorithm that makes decisions, but intractable for a human brain. Intuition (parallel processing) and logic must be used to check and balance each other.
Second, emotions and value judgments are intrinsic to human brain operation. Humans are terribly vulnerable to confirmation bias, because the associative nature of thinking makes it easy to think of ways to find evidence for our current representation/thought/hypothesis, and not evidence against it.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of a good rationalist’s guide to psychology.