Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London house. My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working & nothing after all. Yet he decided to marry, seemingly putting his sober list of pluses and minuses aside, writing in a much more emotional vein: Most of Darwin’s list seems to point him toward a life of staying single. Roberts writes that the rational naturalist and future evolution theorist ultimately seems to toss aside his cost-benefit analysis for a more emotional perspective: How should we proceed, then, especially if we want to make a rational decision?Īfter analyzing Darwin’s detailed list of plus and minuses, Mr. Often there is little evidence to guide us, and what little evidence is available can mislead us. There might be a mere handful of such decisions like this that we face - whether to marry, whom to marry, whether to have children, whether to switch careers and take on new responsibilities. On the right-hand side he tried to imagine what it would be like not to marry (“not forced to visit relatives & to bend in every trifle”).ĭarwin was struggling with what I call a wild problem - a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the day-to-day pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us and where those day-to-day pleasures and pains don’t fully capture what’s at stake. ![]() On the left-hand side he tried to imagine what it would be like to be married (“constant companion,” “object to be beloved & played with - better than a dog anyhow”). To help make his decision, Darwin made a list of the expected pluses and minuses of marrying. Nearing his 30th birthday, he was trying to decide whether to marry - with the likelihood that children would be part of the package. In the Opinion essay “ How to Make a Decision When There’s No ‘Right’ One,” Russ Roberts writes about an agonizing choice made by the English naturalist Charles Darwin - whether to get married or devote his life to science - and what lessons we can draw nearly 200 years later: ![]() How do you go about making a big decision? Talk to friends? Make a list of pluses and minuses? Go with your gut? Sleep on it? Flip a coin? Would you say you are a decisive person? Or do you agonize over every possibility until you are worn out by decision fatigue? Should you cut your hair - or perhaps dye it? Should you finally ask that special someone out on a date? Should you join a sports team, get an after school job or perhaps run for class president? Where should you go to college, or what should you do after high school?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |