Thinking Debt

Instead of understanding things by thinking for ourselves, we borrow the words used to describe that understanding and incur a thinking debt.

If you know that a car’s engine runs by combustion you know the words to describe it. The problem with a description is that it does not resolve reality and you’re likely to run into instances that don’t make sense. Understanding an engine might help you fix one. Knowing the words won’t help you fix one. Knowing only the words and then thinking you can fix an engine will lead to situations that cause anxiety because you’re unable to resolve something that you think you should be able to. The anxiety comes from the unresolved part in your understanding.

But instead of fixing the source of the anxiety by understanding the thing better, we try to deal with it by looking for reassurances from peers, majority, faith, or cults (A cult is a business of reassurances. Consulting companies are cults in the same way bangali baba is because neither do anything and charge for reassuring decisions). 

But these reassurances don’t actually address the parts that don’t make sense. The reassurances only distract from these parts. Acting as a distraction means the solution is temporary and you keep coming back to a loop of thinking about the parts that don’t make sense and then looking for distractions again.

These descriptions that require reassurances create a thinking debt. This debt compounds and the less you think now, the more you have to think later. It’s like not doing your work on time out of laziness and then living with the problems and then these problems snowball and delay even more work.

The interest on this thinking debt is paid by putting up with things that don’t fit you. It’s like buying the wrong sized shirt online because you did not look at the size dimensions and now have to wear a slightly uncomfortable shirt. Every movement faces resistance and even when you’re not moving, you’re not exactly at ease. It’s putting up with work that you don’t like and with people that you don’t want to interact with because you did not figure out what work you liked and what kind of people you liked interacting with. For example, an adhd person ending up in a type of work that requires long durations of focus or an obsessive person ending up in work that has distractions every minute. 

But if you try to think about everything very deeply, you run into the problem of overthinking. How do you decide what things to think about and to what depth? One way to decide this is to see if that thinking is productive. And thinking is productive if it informs a decision in the end.

The tricky thing here is that the lack of decision is often also a decision. So you make many more decisions than you think. So if you’re going to not do something, you should actually decide on not doing it instead of sticking to it as a default option. If you do not apply for a higher degree, it should be because you thought about it and it didn’t make sense instead of not applying because you never thought about it. This allows two things, a regret minimization system because when you look back even at wrong decisions, you will have the reason why you made those decisions.

One problem (or feature, depending on how you look at it) is that decision based thinking is binary. The more you think about things in terms of decisions, the more binary your thinking will become. You can have loose opinions but only strong decisions. The “it depends” people are usually those who don’t have to make decisions based on their opinions. Nuanced discussions are great for amusement or exploration, but when you need something done, you can’t do it without binary thinking.

And when you do think about these binary decisions, you can’t think about them based on circumstances. Because circumstances change and thinking that seems right today will seem wrong tomorrow under new information. You need a consistent framework for making decisions. 

One such framework is principles. Making decisions on principles is easier in the long run than on circumstances of decisions because you can never be perfectly informed of everything involved in making a decision but you stick to a principle. Any decision that you make on the basis of circumstances has a higher chance of regret because new information comes forward.

Of course it is also possible that you will regret a principle but principles are steadier than circumstances. For every decision that is based on circumstances, the amount of thinking it needs becomes recursive where you keep thinking about the decisions until a deadline for it is forced on you because you keep comparing new aspects of the decision and aspects never run out as you go from first order effects to second order effects to third order effects. But if you decide on the basis of principles, every decision is quick. Principles also compound. The more principles you have, the more decisions you can make quicker. It frees you to think about other things instead of getting stuck with analysis paralysis. When you don’t have a single strong principle, you get lost in the mess of a combination you are facing. 

This is why some of the biggest decisions in my life (moving cities, countries) have been taken overnight. I knew if something met the principle I had and didn’t need to sit around and compare pros and cons. My principle for deciding to work at a company is that it needs to have one individual who I would hang out with even outside of work (this is more of a thought experiment and it does not matter if we actually hang out outside of work). And if that one person was removed or left for some reason I would also leave. 

The principles framework makes life easier over time while the opposite of this results in thinking that does not add up or no thinking at all, both of which result in a thinking debt that later has to be paid by making life more difficult.