In the last couple of weeks there have been a number of things that have prompted the “make a blog post” idea to come to mind, but up to now I haven’t managed to follow through on that – so it is time to rectify that omission.
Today I read something on X which got my brain turning – unusual since that is not a source of much inspiration in my experience so far. Someone quoted Maya Angelou
Now quite a long time ago I wrote a post – Making Mistakes – which was actually very much about the same idea. However, on reflection, perhaps the use of the word mistakes was not quite the right thing to say since I was talking about a lack of knowledge (of some sort) rather than the more common way mistake is taken to mean which is to have reached an answer that is not supported by the ‘facts’ that you know.
Elsewhere I better characterised it in the phrase that “No one ever makes a wrong decision”. Better because it sort of captures the Maya Angelou idea that learning is something that is forever incomplete and you cannot be wrong if your decision is based on the ‘best’ information that you have when you make that decision.
One thing that I need to talk a little about is whether things that you ‘should’ know, or things you have forgotten or things that you wilfully ignore or mischaracterise can actually contribute to a truly wrong decision. The use of misinformation most certainly does not make a decision wrong – unless there are reasons why the use of it should have been clearly avoided.
Going back to the original quote threw my thoughts in a slightly different direction. This was something that was brought up in various guises in the responses on X to the quote. I know that it is easy to look back at things in the past – the recent past or many years ago – and wonder why a particular decision did not turn out how you expected it to. The thing here is that there is little to be gained by getting worried or frustrated (or whatever) and berating yourself for “not knowing” – failure is a necessary part of learning in many ways – what would be wrong is not doing the learning.
(and yes at this point I am seeing a very bizarre circular argument developing where it is not wrong to have made the decision but it is wrong to not take onboard the lessons – or is that equally not wrong because you don’t understand the lessons that you need to learn 🤔)
From my previous writing you would know that I – with my systems hat on – think that it is impossible to predict every consequence of even the most simple decisions. Often the “unexpected” happens a long time after the original decision – often affecting those who have nothing to do with the original decision – perhaps in a different location. It is impossible to know – at the time – exactly what will occur and perhaps more relevantly to know what other decisions by other people at different times will bump up against the consequences of your decisions to result in some emergent consequence which not only wasn’t expected but could not be expected.
Trawling through my writing here would find many similar mentions of this sort of thing – the way in which things interact, the difficulty to know future effect and so on. Enough here that there are a few wise words on the subject which agree with my own viewpoint (OK – so Confirmation Bias is a strong attractor that we must be aware of 😂)
I initially had finished this post at this point, but further reflection and writing the next post in this blog has caused me to think of some other relevant remarks.
I got to think about how, when we are relatively young, we make huge life defining decisions and, looking back, we were really very unprepared to make the right choices – so to some extent and in many cases to a very great extent our choices are blind and anything beneficial which comes from them are to put it bluntly just good luck.
When you choose which subjects to study at school; when you choose which university to go to and then which course you follow; when you apply for a job; who will be your friends; these are all decision points that we face with a large amount of ignorance. I think for instance of choosing that I was going to study Accountancy – I chose that mainly because I was good at maths and it seemed as though accountants earned good money 😂. I then chose the university – I say chose, having applied for five only Strathclyde offered me a guaranteed place without any further results in my 6th year at school.
First year at uni we had do do five courses – Accountancy, of course, Business Law and Business Economics were both then mandated and I added Operational Research and Industrial Relations even though I had virtually no idea what Operational Research was 😂. Four years later, Accountancy was gone and I had an honours degree in Operational Research which to a large extent shaped my entire career – although even then it wasn’t until quite a long time after that when its influence was felt when I joined in modelling group (more than ten years later).
Now this is just one of the strands of life defining decisions that I could go through. The next post is about the Either/Or situations – and explains that often its more complicated (like in the which subjects should I study – there was a wide choice, it could be viewed as either study it or not for each subject but there were other constraints) and more than just a binary choice.
Thing is – when you are young and making all these choices you are ill-equipped to decide what is the best option and whatever you choose is only slightly more likely to result in a beneficial outcome than just using pot luck. Yes – we all felt well informed! We could look back on all the decisions (although many we would not remember making) and wonder “what if” but that, as I have written about elsewhere, is a foolish and pointless exercise in reality. The only point of a “what if” investigation is probably to highlight any opportunities that we forfeited by making the choices that we did.
I have, in other posts examined the decision making process, this post is more to point out just how the lack of knowledge at any point in time really does influence the decisions – sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse but always by chance.
I discovered that someone else had also written about this topic – along the same lines, but with different words reflecting their own worldview – worth reading for comparison and confirmation.