This is something I've started noticing more and more with experience: people really hate arbitrary decisions.
People go to surprising lengths to add legitimacy to arbitrary decisions. Sometimes it takes the shape of statistical models that produce noise that is then paraded as signal. Often it comes from pseudo-experts who don't really have the methods and feedback loops to know what they are doing but they have a socially cultivated air of expertise so they can lend decisions legitimacy. (They used to be called witch-doctors, priests or astrologers, now they are management consultants and macroeconomists.)
Me? I prefer to be explicit about what's going on and literally toss a coin. That is not the strategy to get big piles of shiny rocks though.
This is something I've started noticing more and more with experience: people really hate arbitrary decisions.
People go to surprising lengths to add legitimacy to arbitrary decisions. Sometimes it takes the shape of statistical models that produce noise that is then paraded as signal. Often it comes from pseudo-experts who don't really have the methods and feedback loops to know what they are doing but they have a socially cultivated air of expertise so they can lend decisions legitimacy. (They used to be called witch-doctors, priests or astrologers, now they are management consultants and macroeconomists.)
Me? I prefer to be explicit about what's going on and literally toss a coin. That is not the strategy to get big piles of shiny rocks though.