Decide...

When a choice is made, it necessitates an excision of all other choices other than the one that one has chosen to proceed with. Such is the nature of choice, and the associated jargon of ``discrimination''.

But the spurring of all other options to commit to the one choice that one decides on is scary, because commitment is scary, with the one true reason why few dare to leap head first into this.

What if the choice you made... was wrong?

There is no one out there who has to make decisions that do not have this thought lurking at the back of their minds---absolutely no one. The only times where this poses little issues are when the choices to be made are trivial and of no consequence (``Should I wear this shirt or the other today?''). For all other times, there is always that foreboding sense of a choice that was made in error, with the associated need to live through the consequences that come about.

But here's the thing. I think that for the most part, almost all decisions that we make do not matter at all from the perspective of ``correct'' and ``wrong''. The reason is that fundamentally, the choices that are made have consequences that spread out into the time beyond, and given the innate flexibility and adaptability of being humans, even the ``wrong'' decision can lead to a favourable (but possibly previously unaccounted for) outcome, should one continue to improvise, adapt, and overcome.

Therefore, the choices that we make are really determining from whence we are beginning our chain of consequences from.

This scenario matters less so should we be the only people who are affected by our decisions (which itself can be considered an over-simplification---how many times have a ``decision that is only affecting ourselves'' end up spiralling out of our ambit and end up troubling others?), but in the event where there is an immediate effect upon the people who are around us, the stakes are a little higher.

Then the usual methodology for decision-making is under the Kantian concept of the categorical imperative:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

---Immanuel Kant

Effectively, a decision needs to be made in a form consistent with defensibility by a rational person, which may not involve a quantitative approach the way a utilitarian might go for (because almost all numbers are made-up due to reframing and rationalisation, and humans are realistically not as numerately literate as we like to believe ourselves to be).

``But MT, doesn't this eschew the consequences, which is sort of what you are talking about?''

In a way, yes. As I said, the consequences from a decision matter in the sense of where we start from along the chain of consequences---decisions are not static, and neither are the actions that come from them. If we choose a ``good'' choice over a ``bad'' one, we may start from a favourable consequence, but there is no guarantee that the favourable consequence will remain favourable to the extent in which we are bothered enough to track the chain of events. Choosing a ``bad'' choice may put us on a ``bad'' start, but no one can say if the way thereon is only down, and not up.

But what matters then in choices is about convincing enough people that the choice that is to be made at that point in time is the ``best'' one. To do that, we need to explain to others who are affected by our choices why we are making them. The more they can share the context (i.e. assumptions and observations) that we have in making the decision, the more they can be convinced that we are choosing correctly. And the more they are convinced, the more they are likely to have the right buy-in, with the result of influencing the chain of events towards a direction that everyone is happy to be in.

Then what is the best way to achieve a greater shared context to reason from? The easiest is to have shared values, but the danger of having too much of an overlap of values is the subsequent shared blind-spots that come from having almost the same values, without the awareness of other possibilities that are out there. The next more objective form is to get measurements under the hypotheses that govern the choices to be made---if the methodology for these measurements and hypotheses testing can be agreed upon, then there is a shared pool of knowledge from which to reason from, thus creating that necessary shared context to decide from.

When the decision has been made, a good faith effort to commit to it should be applied---if the defense of the decision has been done right, this should not come as a surprise. But like all things involving actions, the decisions themselves need to be revisited whenever new relevant information/knowledge enters into awareness---this is the part that many people forget to do, which explains why people tend to over-emphasise making the ``correct'' decision, instead of making a timely and good-enough decision, and rolling with it until new relevant information questions the relevance and correctness of the previous decision.

If re-examining a past decision is hard, rescinding the previous decision to correct for the updated circumstances to issue a new one is even harder. Because it means having to admit that one is wrong, and in the modern society of heroes, the decision-maker can apparently never be wrong because that's a serious flaw of character.

To which I exclaim: ``Bollocks!'' The time for prophets are over, and even when prophets roamed the earth, they made prophesies that were ``understood'' to be eventually coming true, and not of an immediate nature. Making mistakes should be tolerated, and if the mistakes are righted, the entire action loop should be celebrated, studied, and venerated.

Because that's how we learn new things!

What's the point of being correct all the time? How do you know that you are correct because your process of reaching a decision is correct, or if you are just damn lucky? Want to feel like an imposter? That's easy---never make mistakes and create a complex on yourself on whether do you truly know what you are doing, or if you are just an undeserving hack.

SIN City does not tolerate mistakes. SIN City penalises mistakes. A person who made a ``big mistake'' is condemned, shunned, and marked for a long time as ``he who made a `big mistake' ''. That's why the Yellow Ribbon project has to exist, and even then, it is at best a fig leaf.

Because SIN City does not tolerate mistakes.

``MT, what's the point of this tirade again?''

You tell me. I'm just venting randomly during the last few days of 2025.