Friends & fist-to-five
Making lightning-fast decisions about where to eat dinner
Programmer's log. Epoch time 1671471551. The drive back from the east coast to the Bay Area was largely calm & steady, with the exciting surprise of the winter storms from Tahoe at the end. It was a strange feeling driving west and seeing the road alerts counting down the storm ominously: first "Storm conditions Wed thru Thu", then "Heavy snow Tue-Wed. Drive carefully", and then "Warning: storm conditions Mon-Tue". We had to pull over for one day in Elko, NV when it was snowing heavily, but the next day the sun was out and the roads were clear...
Hi all,
This is a digest for my blog, Simulated Annealing. Reach out with thoughts on Twitter @vivqu or by replying to this email.
Recent posts:
Friends & fist-to-five
Making lightning-fast decisions about where to eat dinner
The trouble with being an easygoing person with similar friends is that it’s really hard to make group decisions.
In general, the best outcome for making a decision with friends is selecting the option that maximizes the overall enjoyment of the group. This is dead simple when everyone can clearly communicate their preferences, and the expressed preferences can then be aggregated together for each option and compared to find the optimal choice.
(It’s also a straightforward decision when one person takes charge and bulldozes over everyone else’s feelings, but that luckily doesn’t happen when you surround yourself with open-minded and lovely people.)
In reality, human communication is slow and never perfectly clear. Having each person in a group comprehensively articulate their utility functions for something as simple as “Where should we go for dinner?” is an exercise in agony. The decision space is so large that it would take forever to enumerate the feelings of every single person for every single restaurant. It also ignores the reality that people often don’t even know their own preferences. “Just say what you want” fails so often as a decision-making approach, even for the smallest group size of 2 people, that there is an entire class of mediocre jokes about boyfriends or husbands complaining about how their girlfriend/wife can’t decide on what to eat.
So instead, because hungry humans want to make a decision quickly, and because being thorough about each person’s food opinions is useless anyway, one person will usually toss out a suggestion. The group will deliberate to evaluate if it’s acceptable. If not, the group evaluates another proposal, and so on and so forth, until a decision is reached.
This strategy comes with its own set of problems. The biggest downside is that we interpret the proposals and other comments as revealing hidden preferences. The interpretation might be totally off base because human language is squishy and hard.
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Hit me up with your thoughts @vivqu. See you later, alligator! 🐊