I THINK MINING

We are called on from time to time to make decisions.  Private, personal, professional, work, design, and writing decisions are made everyday by most of us.  I believe that all honest, moral folk try to make good & sound decisions.  Only the wicked and evil, Iago-like, make bad decisions consciously. Yet we must all admit that in spite of good intention, we have all make poor decisions.  Some would brand them silly decisions; others would brand them simply as bad decisions even though no ill intent was present.

In the book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch writes:

There is something very wrong with that entire conventional model of decision-making, both within single minds and for groups as assumed in social-choice theory.  It conceives of decision-making as process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula.  But in fact that is what happens only at the end of decision-making—the phase that does not required creative thought.  In terms of Edison’s metaphor, the model refers only to the perspiration phase, without realizing that decision-making is problem-solving, and that without the inspiration phase nothing is ever solved and there is nothing to choose between.  At the heart of decision-making is the creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones.

This statement sounds sound.  Could it be that when I have made poor decisions, I have merely failed to seek inspiration, to perspire, to seek new options, and abandon or modify existing ones?

As one ages, decision-making becomes like grabbing for a canary in the cage, and all to often grabbing the wrong one.

None of that, if true, is an excuse.  For I know that I have lazily, late at night, and perhaps a bit wine-impressed, written things that on reflection in the sober light of a new day come to rue, reject, and re-write.  I have even sent entire blog postings to the trash bin, from which they will never be resuscitated.

So to those who may have been offended, I now and forevermore say sorry.  There is no excuse, I did what I did, I now do what I do, and so let us move one.

I know of none who have been harmed beyond repair by my poor decisions.  All I know who can be said to have been impacted have moved on, many with more help from me, to better futures.  So if there are any out there who still smart & sting, let us talk and reconcile.  If the mistake was mine as a result of poor information or failure to deliberate, then re-inform me, demand that I redeliberate, and so let us set things right.

At the very least I can blog about it and not suffer bad dreams wrought of bad things done, said, or left undone.