Regular readers may have heard of Fredkin’s Paradox
– which says that the more similar two choices are, the less the decision
should matter - yet the harder it is to choose between them. I mentioned this
at a recent social event, and received an interesting response back:
“But surely that isn't true, and it doesn't bear out in my experience. If I have to choose between a Chinese restaurant and an Indian restaurant, it's a harder choice than a Chinese and a Thai, or Indian and Bangladeshi?”
On the off chance that readers might find it interesting, I’ll share my response here – which is to say that the above retort actually strengthens Fredkin’s Paradox more than it undermines it. This is because Fredkin wasn’t talking about similarity of category - Chinese vs Indian, Thai vs Bangladeshi, etc - he was talking about similarity of value. That is, two choices are “similar” in the paradox only when they satisfy your goal equally (or nearly equally) well.
Think about your own experience of walking around a capital city trying to help your wife decide where she wants to eat. If the goal is simply “eat something tasty,” and both Chinese and Indian hit that spot near-equally on that day, the decision becomes hard. Not because the cuisines are similar, but because your desire for them is equally strong.
This is why the restaurant example doesn’t contradict the paradox. It actually illustrates it. If in Chinese vs. Indian they are both equally appealing, then the decision is hard. If in Chinese vs. Thai they are not close to being equally appealing, because, say, you had Chinese last weekend and you really fancy a Pad Thai today, then the decision is easy. Similarly, Indian vs Bangladeshi might be similar cuisines but not equally appealing for a number of reasons, making the decision easy, and not a close call.
Of course, a key thing to add about Fredkin’s Paradox is that most human decisions aren’t of this nature. Humans rarely experience true indifference, especially with socio-cultural factors and identity driving so many decisions. Fredkin’s Paradox applies only when you do care, but the options seem equally good in terms of value.
At this point in writing this blog post, I then just started to ponder Fredkin’s Paradox in terms of the dating pool and people’s search for their optimum beloved. If Fredkin is right about the difficulty applying in situations with agonising similarity of value, and I think broadly he is, then if you’re agonising between two prospective beloveds, it’s likely that neither is your optimum beloved. Because as anyone who has fallen in love knows, despite the impression one might form from being a single person immersed in the dating pool search space, the optimum beloved is not the result of a difficult optimisation problem - the optimum beloved is the person who ends the optimisation problem.
Another reason for this is found in Pascal’s great wisdom that “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.” While the beloved is chosen through many rational and empirical-based decision processes, the heart is not really captured by weighing marginal gains or running a mental cost–benefit analysis; it is captured by a kind of intuitive clarity that smothers mechanical deliberation. Yes, reason tries to optimise, compare, and evaluate, but it’s the heart that does the falling.
That’s why, when the heart knows, the decision process comes to a natural cessation, as the optimum beloved becomes the one who makes the very act of further choosing feel unnecessary.
