2023-02-14
- We are at the decision point for the next NYC apartment. Two great options here and here. Lucky to have found them. The decision itself has been quite challenging. It’s been a humbling reminder of the power of cognitive biases even if you are consciously working to mitigate them. In particular, it’s humbling to realize that my abilities at mitigating poor thinking are heavily dependent on the size of the decision in question. For small decisions, I think my mitigation efforts are pretty effective. For large decisions, like where to live for the next year+ of my life with my partner, the storm of poor thinking seems to easily overwhelm the levees I put in place to avoid problems. Bummer. Thankfully, as of now, I feel I am mostly
on the other side of it. I’ve made a decision (option 1 above). But, to keep the storm metaphor going, I do feel like the levees didn’t hold and I ended up getting very wet. Writing that makes it seem like I must have made a bad decision. Or maybe it indicates I’m concerned that I’ll have a bad time or something. No, that’s not what I mean. Those two options are similar enough that my partner and I would be happy in either, and comparably happy at that. The “wetness” mentioned is not referring to a dissappointing outcome, it’s referring to a disappointing process. The decision process was really not great. I agonized over little details and differences between the two spots, falling victim to the precise bias (contrast effect) that I had written about just a couple weeks ago. I also was overwhelmed at many times by loss aversion for apartments I never lived in. I worried that I “had to act fast” or else I would lose something important and never get it back. I totally lost sight of the
fact that this is a market, and one where new things come and go quickly. Now, I still think identifying and moving on compelling apartments quickly is a good idea. But if you get swooped in the course of following a process you think is good, it doesn’t mean you should dramatically alter the process. And certainly you shouldn’t change the process because of fear without any actual evidence that the fear will play out in reality. Those kinds of things play right into the broker’s hand. And that’s a bummer. But it’s also hard to avoid that, especially when the decision feels big. So, yeah, it looks like we’ll end up in a good new spot. But the path to get there showed that the levees I’ve built aren’t even close to strong enough for a real storm.
Date
February 14, 2023