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September 24, 2023

Did you know you can make better decisions with this easy trick?

Pardon the clickbait. But it was too funny not write it, as it's actually true in this case:

If you can’t decide between 2 choices, take the path that’s more difficult/painful in the short term.

Doing this will counteract “hyperbolic discounting,” the brain’s tendency to overestimate short term pain and underestimate long term pain.

— Naval’s razor

Given a choice between a small reward now and a larger one later humans tend to pick the one that arrives sooner. Humans also display the opposite behaviour: given a choice between taking a penalty now, or one later, we tend to pick the one that arrives later.

This causes a problem when we chose what to invest our time in. In the race between putting in the effort now or later, now will rarely win.

To make better decisions line up the pros and cons, and then add an extra Pro to the alternative that has the most short term pain.

Hopefully that will balance out the bias.

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