I don’t want to presume too much, but you probably had to make decisions™ in your life. Some were no-brainers, others had you struggle and lose sleep for many days¹.

What made you settle in the end? It probably wasn’t a single reason, but rather a range of factor, positive or negative, with various weight in the final decision.

This is also true for events in general. For example, if your computer suddenly breaks down one day, the main reason will most probably be a component failing after many power cycles wore it down. But that time you dropped it from the table, or when you spilled your coffee on the keyboard surely didn’t help.

That said, there’s often an obvious main reason, or cause. Since it’s simpler, we tend to consider only this one, discarding the others. Then, by habit, we tend to only accept a single answer to questions like Why did you do that? Why did this happen?.

Most of the time, this is an acceptable approximation, although we lose nuance. While in some cases, it makes us miss the forest for the tallest tree. Even worse, this weakness can be exploited to bias our judgment.

Take inflation, it’s a complex economic phenomenon and necessarily has many root causes. Yet, it’s often presented with a single one: “it’s the political opponent!”, “it’s China!”, “it’s the virus!”. While it might not be an outright lie, this incomplete representation is misleading.

At best, it’s oversimplification at play, but more realistically it’s an attempt at influencing public opinion. It’s even a signature move of all flavors of populists around the world.

To avoid this pitfall, I suggest visualizing all the possible reasons, weighted with their importance as a pie chart. Most often, the chart will yield something like:

Where, like we said, you can focus on the main issue. But sometimes you’ll end up with this:

This time, you can’t ignore any co-reason as they are equally important to comprehension.

Of course, you won’t be able to work out the charts for inflation, or unemployment on your own. However, doing this mental exercise should improve your critical thinking when presented with oversimplified arguments on these subjects.

It has the additional benefit of being useful for your daily life, whether it’s making decisions, understanding mistakes, or self-improvement.

In addition, another potential usage of these charts is envisioning the future… You might argue that taking decisions is already future related and I wouldn’t have any valid counter-argument, so please bear with me.

Future isn’t deterministic², we can’t predict it³. To us, it’s a set of possible outcomes and probabilities that are yet to be resolved, akin to Schrodinger’s cat whose fate is undetermined until we open its box.

Yet, this is another issue where we tend to accept only one outcome, with the same reasons and shortfalls as before. Because if in the end, the future indeed collapses into a single possibility, it’s not necessarily the one we planned for.

For our case, we should consider all possibilities as simultaneously valid, and visualize the future as a pie chart of possible outcomes, weighted with their relative probability, to help us prepare contingencies.

Regarding this preparation, you can vary your effort based on the size of the pie slice or even better, you can use the strategy I employed in the climate change article. Your choice.

As a side note, my lawyer asked me to write that I decline all responsibility in the event of the future resolving to something you haven’t anticipated at all.

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Now, imagine that you’re convinced, not easy I know, but try. Your legitimate concern will be how exactly do I make those charts?

Let’s take a decision-making example: You’re finishing high school and hesitate between two majors for college. For each major, you need the chart of reasons you’d choose this particular one.

First you make a list of reasons, that’s pretty standard, and I don’t have any specific tip to do that. Next, the tricky part: determining the weight of each item on the list.

It’s not like we have numerical values associated with our feelings and ideas, so it’ll be more about finding their relative weight and filtering the truly important reasons from the list-padding ones.

To do that, you can rank the items by order of importance. Whether it’s rational importance with things like “The employment opportunities are good” that should be higher than “The girl/boy ratio improves my chance of sexual encounters”, or emotional importance “My goal is working in healthcare to alleviate suffering” versus “I don’t like maths”.

Sometimes it’s more complicated and in these situations a little imagination might help through running what if scenarios: “Would having X but not Y change my mind?”, “What if Z is not what I imagined?”. Once you have sorted this out, you can make your decision by comparing the charts and picking the one that speaks more to you.

If all this isn’t enough, it is with deep sorrow that I have to inform you I’m in fact not a life coach, and you clearly need to seek professional help with your crippling inability to make decisions.

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