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Errr.. reading too widely is a well known problem called "analysis paralysis" or "procrastination" and there are several other labels. (Curious!) people who "do

Errr.. reading too widely is a well known problem called "analysis paralysis" or "procrastination" and there are several other labels. (Curious!) people who "don't read enough" are great to have around the ones who read too much, from my pov problems stem from these groups being unwilling to work together.

dsr_ 5y ago
"analysis paralysis" isn't caused by reading too widely. It's a form of executive function disorder, either situational or ongoing, where making a choice is aborted by incomplete evaluation of the available options. Your mind assigns an infinite penalty and non-zero chance of failure, and that blocks consideration of actual chances of success. One of the effective solutions is to construct a risk table, in which you list out: - each option - the costs to perform the option - the likelihood of success of the option - the value of success via the option - the penalty of failure via the option - the cost to ameliorate failure of the option And you never assign a 0 or infinite value to any of those factors; a range of .05 to .99 is usually appropriate. For binary choices, this can sometimes be short-circuited by flipping a coin and asking yourself if this feels worse than the alternative.
- openfuture 5y ago
  Okay, that's a great suggestion, let me go read some more suggestions on how to do something other than research things /s You wave away my association of "reading _too_ widely" and "analysis paralysis" by sharing your preferred definition of the latter ... but that isn't really an argument against the association of the two. I didn't say that analysis paralysis causes reading too widely. I said that they are the same, so if you want to take your definition of analysis paralysis as a given then you could say analysis paralysis can cause reading too widely. Anyway, all I wanted to communicate with my comment is that when you say that you can do "too little of X" but not "too much of X" then you are biased on X, there is always someone who takes X too far and you may not see it because you've associated those people with something totally different. Personally I don't believe in "wasted time" or other subjective notions (in the abstract) so for me this whole discussion is lacking context (you can waste time if you have a context; some loss function, otherwise no).

dsr_ 5y ago

"analysis paralysis" isn't caused by reading too widely. It's a form of executive function disorder, either situational or ongoing, where making a choice is aborted by incomplete evaluation of the available options. Your mind assigns an infinite penalty and non-zero chance of failure, and that blocks consideration of actual chances of success. One of the effective solutions is to construct a risk table, in which you list out: - each option - the costs to perform the option - the likelihood of success of the option - the value of success via the option - the penalty of failure via the option - the cost to ameliorate failure of the option And you never assign a 0 or infinite value to any of those factors; a range of .05 to .99 is usually appropriate. For binary choices, this can sometimes be short-circuited by flipping a coin and asking yourself if this feels worse than the alternative.

openfuture 5y ago
Okay, that's a great suggestion, let me go read some more suggestions on how to do something other than research things /s You wave away my association of "reading _too_ widely" and "analysis paralysis" by sharing your preferred definition of the latter ... but that isn't really an argument against the association of the two. I didn't say that analysis paralysis causes reading too widely. I said that they are the same, so if you want to take your definition of analysis paralysis as a given then you could say analysis paralysis can cause reading too widely. Anyway, all I wanted to communicate with my comment is that when you say that you can do "too little of X" but not "too much of X" then you are biased on X, there is always someone who takes X too far and you may not see it because you've associated those people with something totally different. Personally I don't believe in "wasted time" or other subjective notions (in the abstract) so for me this whole discussion is lacking context (you can waste time if you have a context; some loss function, otherwise no).