
Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Happiness [pdf] - mannigfaltig
https://www.gwern.net/docs/2016-levitt.pdf
======
mabbo
My grandmother's family arrived at the docks in England in the early
depression years, and flipped a coin. Heads, Australia; Tails, Canada.

I don't know how the coin affected their happiness with the decision they
made. All I know is that two generations later, I'm sitting in -9C
temperatures in mid-march because of "tails".

~~~
segmondy
If they had gotten heads, you won't exist. :)

~~~
xyzzy4
His/her consciousness might exist inside a different person though.

~~~
mabbo
No, I pretty definitely wouldn't exist. My father's family has been in Canada
a lot longer, and I'm half him.

~~~
xyzzy4
Ok but maybe your father or mother would've had a baby with someone else, and
then you'd be that person.

~~~
Namrog84
I'm not even the same person as who i was yesterday.

Everytime my stream of consciousness stops and starts I am a new person built
from the thousands of lives that came before.

This is not a saddening fact but an enlightening one. We all stand on the
shoulders of those that came before us.

~~~
Fjolsvith
I thought we stood on their heads...

------
buro9
I coin toss, but I don't let the outcome determine the action.

Instead I let how I _feel_ about the outcome determine the action.

Most of the time a coin toss is not required as I am quite decisive, but if I
feel particularly paralysed by an opportunity or decision, and unable to
determine the best course of action... then I will toss a coin and look at the
outcome, and decide whether or not I feel at peace with the outcome, whether
there is regret.

I act on the immediate feeling of the outcome, not the outcome itself.

~~~
FTA
I've read a few different books that say we make decisions from our gut or
emotions--logic is only used to try and justify it to ourselves.

~~~
saeranv
Yeap. There's some research that suggests the unconscious mind is better at
making complex decisions then the conscious mind. [1][2]

"Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears
to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of
information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory
choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the
information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with" [1]

[1] [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8732-sleeping-on-
it-b...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8732-sleeping-on-it-best-for-
complex-decisions/)
[2][http://people.hss.caltech.edu/~steve/rightchoice.pdf](http://people.hss.caltech.edu/~steve/rightchoice.pdf)

------
kyleschiller

      The great majority of the recruitment for the study was done through social media associated with Freakonomics... in the recruiting for the study, I emphasized that I was only interested in people who were having a difficult time making a life decision... Finally, this is a group which is apparently attracted to the idea of using a coin toss to potentially resolve major life dilemmas.
    

Not that we should automatically dismiss the results, but that is a pretty
important qualification.

Also:

    
    
      Empirical economists are increasingly moving from a role of consumers of data to producers of data. This paper represents an extreme expression of that trend. It is difficult to imagine how one could hope to answer the questions addressed in this paper without generating the data. As the prominence of social media grows, opportunities to recruit subject pools for randomized field experiments from broad swaths of the population will only increase.
    

As cool as that is, you've got to worry that if social scientists have the
ability to conduct significant studies as a result of their popularity, we'll
start to see a world where the most prolific social scientists are necessarily
more and more like entertainers.

~~~
notahacker
Levitt's been more entertainer than social scientist for a while now, and as
for other social scientists wanting a broad section of candidates for field
experiments, social media associated with the university or other third party,
or even paid social has the same recruitment potential without the systematic
biases of Freakonomics fans

------
binarymax
When stuck on a decision, sometimes I use this trick: I flip a coin, and while
it's in the air, I pay close attention to how I _want_ it to land. The
subconscious tends to show itself when I am tuned in at that moment. Then I
just use that feeling as the decision and ignore the coin. No regrets so far!

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Sopranos fan?

------
handojin
During a corporate training once, our tables were given the task of deciding
which of a set of personas would receive a liver transplant based on some
provided biographical data. The big reveal was undoubtedly to be how our
biases informed our decision.

I convinced the rest of the participants that choosing was in fact immoral and
the only fair way to decide who lived and died was a lottery.

The explanation that Alice the loose woman (really! old material I guess) was
getting a new liver because she was _lucky_ was not a well received.

~~~
taneq
I don't understand how it's 'more moral' to abdicate responsibility to the
toss of a coin than to choose as best you can based on what you know. That
seems like saying the 'moral' answer to a trolley problem is to run away from
the lever so that whatever happens is 'not your fault'.

~~~
handojin
The trolley problem is an interesting frame.

For the sake of an unfamiliar reader, in the problem, we have a man standing
by the buffers and an out of control trolley car. We're asked to choose
between pulling a lever, which will divert the car to the buffers, thus
killing the man but saving the people on board the car, or not pulling the
lever, which results in the deaths of the trolley passengers but allows the
man to live.

Choice one:

The out of control car is 'not your fault' but deliberately choosing to kill
the man would be. You couldn't live with yourself knowing you'd been the cause
of his death. You opt not to pull the lever.

Choice two:

That's crazy. None of this is your fault but it's your 'responsibility' to
choose now. It's a simple utilitarian calculus - more lives = better. You pull
the lever.

My problem with all this is that either response (and people split on the
response) is nothing more than a reflection of the unconscious biases of the
respondent. This is revealed when we discover that by changing the framing
slightly - e.g. asking the question in another language (a different part of
the brain is engaged = more utilitarians) or making the killing of the
innocent man a direct act (you push him off an overpass = more 'not my
faults') - changes the balance of responses in statistically significant ways.

The right answer, of course, is to toss a coin and do what it tells you.

~~~
projektir
I believe a lot of odd results that come out of hypotheticals lie with the
fact that they're hypotheticals.

The trolley problem makes an inherent assumption that value can be summed by
adding up people (i.e., more people > less people), and therefore there's only
one truly correct answer, but that's not how decisions are actually made in
the real world and there are very good reasons for that.

For instance: why is there a group of people and then the separate individual?
Does the group have something in common? Is there something special about the
individual? Someone made a judgment call when they created the situation. The
end result is now unknown, and my answer would be that the decision therefore
doesn't matter.

Choosing to do something would require performing another judgment call, which
is actually very problematic. This is demonstrated fairly well by one of the
reframings of the problem: the one where a surgeon kills a healthy person to
save 5 dying patients. A world in which such things happen would be considered
quite terrible by many, yes this seems to be a valid implementation of the
trolley problem. The surgeon could then take his 5 patients and the one
healthy person and recreate a trolley scenario and then let someone else deal
with it. The correct answer, according to a person who doesn't want healthy
travelers sacrificed for people who need organs, would be to not touch the
lever. Yet, they do not have access to this information, so they do not know
what the end result is. So the decision doesn't matter.

The responsibility is indeed with whoever has created the situation. Another
party getting involved may make it better or worse by sheer luck but "more
people > less people" is, in my opinion, a horrible philosophy and this
implicit assumption should be thrown out of the problem. Once you do that,
though, the problem disintegrates.

I would generally be wary of critique of intuition based on failure in
hypotheticals. Intuition wasn't designed around hypotheticals and doesn't
believe in them.

~~~
taneq
Everything both you and parent poster said boils down to "run away from the
question because I don't like either of the answers." Which is a very human
response, but you then throw the baby out with the bath water.

To be really useful, you need to consider these thought experiments in the
_least convenient world_ \- assume that there is explicitly no way to avoid
the central point
([http://lesswrong.com/lw/2k/the_least_convenient_possible_wor...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2k/the_least_convenient_possible_world/)
for further reading). So in this case, it doesn't matter 'whose fault' the
predicament is. You don't know anything about the individuals involved except
the number killed by each of two choices. "Optimise net lives saved" is indeed
a horrible strategy, but _under the least convenient possible circumstances_
can you come up with a better one?

Your comment on intuition failing on hypothetical scenarios is on the mark,
and that's the point of this kind of scenario - to see _in what way_ intuition
fails, and how it will fail in different directions based on presentation (eg.
we'll passively let 5 people die rather than actively killing one, but we'll
save 5 people even if it involves indirectly killing one.)

------
Judgmentality
Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,

and you're hampered by not having any,

the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,

is simply by spinning a penny.

No — not so that chance shall decide the affair

while you're passively standing there moping;

but the moment the penny is up in the air,

you suddenly know what you're hoping

-Piet Hein

Edit: HN is not friendly towards quoting poems.

------
laumars
When I was 18 I left most of my decisions to a coin toss for about a month. It
lead to some seriously interesting antics like randomly ending up at squat
parties miles from home on a Sunday.

The adult part of me wish I kept a record of what happened as I could have
published some of the stories. But the 18 year old me who was willing to
decide his life by a toss of a coin was hardly going to be the same 18 year
old who was responsible enough to keep a record of his activities.

For what it's worth though, it was a pretty fun month.

------
remx
I enjoy applying the I Ching[0] to decision making. It's like a coin toss, but
on steroids

[0]
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/534289.The_I_Ching_or_Bo...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/534289.The_I_Ching_or_Book_of_Changes)

[#]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching)

~~~
jyriand
I have used Tarot cards to give me some perspective on some descisions. As a
side effect I start to experience a lot more of unexplainable synchronicities
in my daily life and in connection with the decision. Most striking example: I
was at a point where I needed to decide if I should break up with my
girlfriend. I was doing the taro spread to get the answer and at the same time
my girlfriend called and told me that she met this one guy and she would like
to go on a date with him.

~~~
miceeatnicerice
Being faithful to chance events is a great way to organise your knowledge - it
basically subordinates facts to wit. Fight the facts! Become self-aware!
That's how I think it works anyway.

Difficult to follow through with on the larger scale, though - which is where
the little synchronicities come in.

------
jmartinpetersen
For a novelist's take on making life changing decisions based on chance, Luke
Rhinehart's "The Dice Man" comes recommended.

~~~
stephancoral
"No Country For Old Men" also comes to mind

~~~
nimchimpsky
the dice man is about one guy basing every life decision around coin tossing.
Funny, bit dated, worth a read imo.

------
dzuc
"Life is but a gamble! Let flipism chart your ramble!"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism)

------
phkahler
Stress. They say people will adapt to a "new normal" within 3-6 months of a
major life change. I would argue that a person who is on the fence about a
major life decision is maintaining a state of stress by not making the
decision. Once they make the decision and commit to it, they will achieve the
"new normal" in time, but will be freed from the stress of indecision. The
relief of that stress should make them happier all by itself.

------
ucaetano
_Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —_

 _I took the one less traveled by,_

 _And that has made all the difference._

It is worth remembering that Frost's point is that it actually doesn't make
_any_ difference.

~~~
tutufan
??? Is that what those lines mean?

~~~
cypherpunks01
See this article [1] for an explanation of how the poem is supposedly taught &
understood incorrectly. I tend to agree with the claim.

The crux is in the 2 paragraphs starting with "Frost’s poem turns this
expectation on its head", and the main claim is:

"According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages
hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the
kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming
that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to
what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance)."

[1] [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-
misr...](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-
in-america/)

------
miceeatnicerice
Anyone ever come across Alain Badiou? And if so, what's his reputation like?
All my small acquaintance with set theory etc has basically come second-hand
from trying to read his book, and now I'm left with the probably unjustifiable
impression that mathematical reasoning has to come to a crisis, and must admit
arbitrariness as a kind of self-reflexive pivot.

As for why - I couldn't tell you, but it made sense at the time.

~~~
sedachv
I read Badiou's _Number and Numbers_. The first half was a good introduction
to the history of attempts to axiomatize various kinds of numbers. The second
half was a so-so introduction to surreal numbers. The book seems like some
notes that Badiou wrote for himself while studying mathematics. Not really
sure where any of the reviewers and blurb-givers got the idea that the book
had anything to do with philosophy or capitalism or politics.

------
megawatthours
Relevant and very entertaining read: The Dice Man

------
itstriz

      Individuals who are told by the coin toss to make a change are much more likely to make a change and are happier six months later than those who were told by the  coin to maintain the status quo.
    

I wonder if they removed the coin and just split people into groups that
maintain status quo and groups that always make the change if the results
would be similar. Perhaps the urge people have to consider the change in the
first place is a good indicator that it is a change they actually do want to
commit to.

~~~
notahacker
The theory is that a cohort _whose uncertainty over a decision is so close to
50 /50 that a coin toss has a large statistical effect on whether they make
the change or not_[1] ought to be close to 50/50 on whether it has a desirable
outcome in the event they change (allowing for a degree of risk aversion, and
making the fairly standard economic assumptions that humans primarily optimise
for an analogue of [future] satisfaction, and their errors in predicting their
future satisfaction are random rather than systematically skewed towards
underestimating or overestimating their future outcome)

In practice, it's likely the choice of _reported happiness over a six month
followup period_ as the indicator of whether it worked is the major factor
here; many negative aspects of a decision take much longer to take effect (get
even more bored/frustrated with the new job, miss their ex despite the
shortcomings in their relationship, realise that going back to school is
costing a lot of money and not advancing them in any way)

It's possible that the larger fraction of people who are happy six months
after making the change they agonised over is entirely cancelled out if you
ask them after 24.

[1]the paper seems to suggest the coin had a statistically significant impact
on the sample group's decision making even if their ex ante predictions of
their probability of making the change were greater or less than 50%

------
will_pseudonym
The title reminds me of No Country For Old Men.

[https://youtu.be/OLCL6OYbSTw](https://youtu.be/OLCL6OYbSTw)

------
js8
I look at it as follows: If you are really undecided about something, it
really means that the two (or more) options are not discernible enough (given
information you have), and so they are, from your perspective, very similar
(they can lead to different outcomes but you do not know). So it kinda makes
sense to decide it randomly.

------
imrehg
Kinda relevant piece art: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern_Are_Dead)

------
asifjamil
I wonder how this study can be used as evidence against determinism, ie., that
humans really do possess free will. If the coin toss relevantly affects the
person's decision, then it seems like random chance plays a key role in
affecting our experience, right?

~~~
laughingman2
I have strong view that there is no such thing as free will.In close scrutiny
any definition of free will falls apart.

Wittgenstien's view that most philosophical problems of dissolve by
understanding that the question involved is nonsensical or not defined
properly.

I think events

1\. follow Cause -> Effect (Casual)

2\. Or they Random (If we don't find evidence for a deterministic
interpretation of quantum mechanics)

There is no 3rd option. Some people try to derive free will from randomness,
which means they are essentially saying that their "free will" is equivalent
to blind selection without any regard for causes, which contradicts the normal
common sense(nonsense?) use of the word.

~~~
BadCookie
I've made this argument to myself and I can't find fault with it, but it does
really bother me. Can it be true that I have no control over my life? I find
that hard to swallow at a gut level but can't explain how it might be
otherwise.

~~~
hodwikSE
It's not that you have no "control", it's that there is no "you".

You are the set of reactions to external stimuli that a certain system goes
through.

~~~
laughingman2
One can also say that "you" cannot be separated from the "external" system?

Alan Watts -

“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all
that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out
on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated
patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of
things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated
human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the
complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we
define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside
your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way
out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time.
Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human
being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big
bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this
is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're
not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a
sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are
the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you
are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and-
so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial
energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm
that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ”

------
lemoncucumber
Makes me think of the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith...

------
hyfgfh
I usually wait until I'm very tired, I sit in a couch and then ask myself
"should I do X?". If I can get up it is a yes...

------
unixhero
This is why I love academic economics.

