Nah… in the hotel example, you slow down as to not maximize your mistake if you’ve made one. If you have doubts, they are probably justified enough to do something to examine the evidence while minimizing the fallout.
Before you set out on the trip, you’d likely have checked some map and had an idea of how far to travel along the road the hotel is located on. You’d say, “Oh. It’s 17.8 miles after I turn onto highway 99. Got it.”
Then, you turn onto highway 99, but you’d be thinking about something other than “17.8 miles to go”. You’d be thinking about the big meeting you had the next day, or the cramp in your leg, or your ex-girlfriend, etc. So x miles would pass, and you’d lose track of what the value of x was.
At this point, you’re right that driving full speed either forward or back would optimize your arrival time IF you guess right. But during the time you are trying to make a decision, it makes rational sense to slow your speed a bit and think. (30 mph seems excessive in a 60mph zone)
You probably didn’t pass the hotel yet. I’d say it’s north of 50% probability. While you were daydreaming about the big meeting and your ex, you weren’t completely distracted from the task of finding your hotel—you were just daydreaming, not actually dreaming. Add this to the fact you’d have some reasonable idea of how many miles you’d traveled since turning onto hwy 99, and it’s a 50.1%+ chance you didn’t miss your hotel yet.
Slowing down for a minute is certainly preferable to just turning around the moment you have a doubt. It’s also better than just proceeding through your doubts at the same speed and making the problem worse.
Slowing down gives you a chance to look around and check for clues that you may have missed, or not yet arrived at the hotel. It allows you to think and reason through the evidence. Did you already pass a commercial district and now you are in the rural boonies? Or have you not yet seen an area where a hotel might be?
The other examples don’t seem to fit the first analogy that well. If the point is “it’s rational to commit to one thing since half-assing two things tends not to work” then I agree, but it’s not terribly novel stuff. (65 upvotes? Really?)
Nah… in the hotel example, you slow down as to not maximize your mistake if you’ve made one. If you have doubts, they are probably justified enough to do something to examine the evidence while minimizing the fallout.
Before you set out on the trip, you’d likely have checked some map and had an idea of how far to travel along the road the hotel is located on. You’d say, “Oh. It’s 17.8 miles after I turn onto highway 99. Got it.”
Then, you turn onto highway 99, but you’d be thinking about something other than “17.8 miles to go”. You’d be thinking about the big meeting you had the next day, or the cramp in your leg, or your ex-girlfriend, etc. So x miles would pass, and you’d lose track of what the value of x was.
At this point, you’re right that driving full speed either forward or back would optimize your arrival time IF you guess right. But during the time you are trying to make a decision, it makes rational sense to slow your speed a bit and think. (30 mph seems excessive in a 60mph zone)
You probably didn’t pass the hotel yet. I’d say it’s north of 50% probability. While you were daydreaming about the big meeting and your ex, you weren’t completely distracted from the task of finding your hotel—you were just daydreaming, not actually dreaming. Add this to the fact you’d have some reasonable idea of how many miles you’d traveled since turning onto hwy 99, and it’s a 50.1%+ chance you didn’t miss your hotel yet.
Slowing down for a minute is certainly preferable to just turning around the moment you have a doubt. It’s also better than just proceeding through your doubts at the same speed and making the problem worse.
Slowing down gives you a chance to look around and check for clues that you may have missed, or not yet arrived at the hotel. It allows you to think and reason through the evidence. Did you already pass a commercial district and now you are in the rural boonies? Or have you not yet seen an area where a hotel might be?
The other examples don’t seem to fit the first analogy that well. If the point is “it’s rational to commit to one thing since half-assing two things tends not to work” then I agree, but it’s not terribly novel stuff. (65 upvotes? Really?)