Choice is not the enemy
I love watching TED Talks. The beautifully crafted and perfected talks offer a great overview of different concepts, research and opinions. Sometimes, however, while the central idea resonates with me, I can’t help but disagree with the conclusion the speaker draws. This happened when I recently watched the following TED talk:
It’s one of the oldest talks available on YouTube, and I believe the earlier ones are far better in quality.
The belief
The speaker, Barry Schwartz, explains a rather surprising story. We have always believed that more choices bring freedom to our lives. We think more choices would mean one of them would better suit us than before.
If we have multiple choices to buy a phone, one should be just what we need. Out of all the clothing options, at least one should fit us well and make us happier. But is it so?
The truth and the dilemma
Barry Schwartz then goes on to show with a few statistical facts that more choices do not bring more happiness. The person in question enters paralysis due to choices. Mobile phones today vary in processor power, screen size, camera setup, space, memory, battery, OS, sound quality and so on. With so many options, it becomes overwhelming to make the choice. People instead avoid looking deep at these parameters and go for what is cool in the market. Or they’d look for someone to advise them, which is why the explosion in device options was led by an explosion in unboxing and review videos and blogs, to the extent that it is a full-time job for some.
Another note is that we assume better choices equals more happiness but it isn’t so. Barry Schwartz buys a pair of jeans better than he had ever bought before, but was a lot more disappointed due to raised expectations. The new pair of jeans works out to be the best one he ever had, but he had expected an even better one.
Essentially there are four reasons why more choices paradoxically make us feel more terrible:
1. The regret of not having chosen the other options
2. The opportunity cost of the option you choose
3. Escalation of expectations due to availability of all the options
4. Self-blame due to above
The Solution
So far, I’m fascinated and agree with what the great psychologist says. But it’s what follows that doesn’t sit with me. Barry suggests that the way out is to have low expectations and lesser choices. Going back to where we came from. While lowering expectations can lead to happiness, I’m sure there are more people like me who can not settle. True engineers out there are never satisficers but optimizers. We always want to get to the best form of an object or product. Only that brings us joy.
The right thing to do is to have as many options as possible, but not make the choice ourselves. This is driven by the fact that choices do make things better for us and it is the decision process only that drives the pain. If we were able to delegate the decision-making process to someone who not only understands us but can tirelessly look and compare all the options and come back to us with one single option which works like magic, we would get both simplicity and efficiency. While other human beings can do this for us, it is easy to imagine an AI system that, given our persona, can make the choices for us.
I recently came across a web app called Read Something Great (RSG), a project by Louis Pereira who wants to help us mortals cut the decision-making process on what to read by serving 5 good articles, essays or posts from writers he handpicks. After I came across RSG, I’ve seen the time I spend on Twitter has decreased dramatically – I simply head to RSG. I also think the fact that I scroll less hunting for something worthwhile to read translates to less fatigue. The beauty of RSG is the simplicity in the end result while serving some of the best options from an almost infinite sample space.
While this RSG is human-curated, there are a lot of examples of AI curated choices, especially in music, movies, online shopping, although it is often hindered with ads acting like pure suggestions. For this reason, I think the most effective recommendation machine would come from outside of the FAMANG companies because it is crucial that we trust the choices we are served.