shape of my heart (and thoughts)

we spoke about exploring decision-making through the lens of understanding the form of the decision itself in what the form is going on

what does the form of a concept mean?

let’s see if we can answer this through an analogue.

when we see an object, think of 2–3 things that are immediately apparent.

take a minute to pause, and recall any object you’ve recently seen. hold the image in your mind, and try to examine it with the intention of understanding the object.

one thing that pops out is it’s color. forget the exact colour itself — its tone, shade and so on and so forth. is the object fundamentally light or dark? a solid or a mix? the variations are endless. it’s an interesting direction, but maybe not very useful as a starting point. it feels too specific as a description while having too many options.

what about the material of the body of the object? could be metallic, plastic, mud, or paper or any amongst millions of things. we treat different objects differently based on this. i would toss a ball made of whatever balls are made of, but maybe not if it was made of crystals (at least, not yet) this feels similar to the problem with colours at this point — too specific a description to link to any part our decision process, while having too many options.

let’s change tracks, take a step back and look at what we’re trying to achieve:

we want to start thinking about our decisions by being able to identify signals and ignore noise.

let’s focus on this — specifically, “ignoring noise.”

one good way to start doing this could be to start eliminating thoughts, decisions or scenarios that are obviously not going to happen.
for example, if I have to decide what my plan for next quarter’s marketing is going to be, it’s quite useless for me to think about good vacation spots for my next trip. similarly, if i’m improving a client’s website UI, it’s quite useless for me to think about the cost they incurred over the last three years.

so we know the 0th step now:

eliminate all the obvious unrelated scenarios and thoughts in the context of the decision ahead of you.

while it seems intuitively obvious with far-fetched scenarios like the above two examples, let’s add more vigour to this process and look at how we can define the line between something being completely noisy vs something being a potential signal.

i’d like to introduce a term here — edge cases.

edge cases are those scenarios that have a non-trivial but tiny probability of occurring. these are the extreme cases. these aren’t scenarios that are unrealistic — for example, the probability of a meteoroid falling on you is certainly non-zero, but also not something that makes sense to account into the decision.
instead, these are the extreme cases that you have a reasonable way of happening and something you can take into account — either positive or negative or a mix. they have a small chance of occurring but have a massive impact on your decision when they do.

let’s play this out. please pause for a minute to think about some recent decision you’ve taken or have to take. . .

now think about the absolute best case and worst case scenarios for this decision. we could do this the following way -

Case 1

you could be mulling over asking for a raise.

1. the absolute best case is that you get more than what you asked for — a double promotion! (woohoo). in this scenario, there’s no downside at all, and a great upside.
2. the absolute worst case is that they fie you for having the temerity to ask for a raise. in that case, do you really want to work for somebody who’s going to fire you for doing the most natural thing to humans — ask a question? you’re going to better off over the long term cutting a toxic work environment like this as soon as possible. so the worst case has the downside of you getting fired, but the upside of you leaving something destructive behind.
3. another case is ambivalence — they acceded to your request, but nothing at all happens after this and it seems like your conversation has gotten lost on its way through the convoluted journey of bureaucracy. in this case, the upside is that you have at least a verbal commitment that’s going to help you validate your worth as an employee if nothing else. the downside is that you don’t get a raise — which leaves you no worse off than before.

Case 2

you’re applying for a college for your masters.

1. the college you join is better behind your imagination — you have a great college experience and a solid life ahead of you. only upsides, no downsides!
2. the college you joined is the worst possible college you could join. you will either then transfer to another college as soon as you can, or figure out other ways of achieving your end goal while getting your degree at the same time. the downside is that you have to put in a lot more effort for reaching that goal, and you might decry the money lost in the entire process. the upside is that it’s not going to ruin your life if you do the additional things you now have to do.
3. the college you are going to join is hit with a scandal that significantly impacts it’s reputation or is forced to close down. the downside is that i e money you’ve spent is going to be lost. the upside is that you’ll still probably get a degree to boost your credentials.

all of these are cases with a small probability of happening — but if they do, they clearly have a massive impact on how your decision plays out. forget the specifics and the upsides and downsides of these examples. the point is to identify the different meaningful edge cases that exist around your decision.

in doing this, a shape of the decision is starting to emerge — the edge cases define the extreme points of your decision and its impact.

these act as certain bounds or constraints that will help you contextual the decision you’re making and sort of anchor them to what the actual outcomes look like. think about what the shape of an object is — it’s essentially a surface that limits or contains the object. everything about the object only exists within this shape.

this intuitively feels very similar to defining the shape of a concept or a decision through this edge case.

we, therefore, have arrived at a few signals that will help guide our decision.

so this is Step 1:

identify and structure the edge cases of your decision

the conclusion of the essay is this: a good way to start eliminating noise is to discard all trivial or practically nonsensical cases of your decision. a good way to start identifying signals is to look at non-trivial edge cases that have a low chance of happening but have a significant impact if they do.

we also have a key assumption here:

edge cases can be defined in a meaningful enough quantity and structure that it gives us a firm grasp of what the extreme cases look like for the decision at hand.

let’s see where this amble in the garden takes us.
onwards and upwards,
d.