Gathering Information you won’t use directly is often useful
The Story
Today I moved. I asked one of my housemates about good shopping opportunities for buying groceries. I already scouted two shops. They were not very good. My housemate told me that the store that they found was also not very good. I decided to go anyway. On my way there, I remembered the advice, that gathering information is only valuable if you act on it, and I did not act on the advice of my housemate. So was it useful to have gathered that information in the first place?
What’s going on?
Should I have not gone to the shop? Well as it turns out the shop was much better than I expected based on the description my housemate gave me. The cashier even gave me a discount for some overripe mango. One of the other shops that also had fruit (the third one did not even have fruit) did not want to give me a discount on some overripe bananas.
Gathering the information served multiple other roles. It is often a social bonding activity. But more importantly, while gathering the information, I would get an intuitive feeling of how much that person knows what he is doing, which should inform how much I should trust his advice. So if you don’t know someone well, the quickest way to get information and an evaluation of the information might be to ask for the information.
So gathering information A might make sense even if you don’t act on the information A, because while gathering the information A, you might gather information B that tells you how much you should trust information A. This can go deeper than one level.
As with all good advice for thinking, I cannot tell whether this is novel or trivial or both. I’d love more examples in either case, so I can make sure I understand what you’re talking about.
As I read the post, it would also recommend (for example, duh) testing lots of life coaches, seeing whose advice performed the best in the first month, and then getting lots more advice from them. In that sense, there is something of an Explore/Exploit dynamic going on here, with a framing focusing on evaluating data sources.
I think this article might be related, if you decide to write more on this: https://www.gwern.net/Modus