- In the title, please remind everyone what sections you'll be discussing.
- If you want to cite the text, please provide a few words so we can search the text and find your source.
- As a friendly reminder, the book is available here.
- I'm going to attempt a quick summary, then ask a few questions.
He outlines ten strategies people use to avoid decisions. The five we will discuss here are religion, drifting, allegiance to a movement or cause, allegiance to a school of thought, and exegetical thinking. He briefly mentions totalitarian government as a way of avoiding decisions, as well, but notes that people do not voluntary choose to live under totalitarian regimes, so it would be a misnomer to describe this as a strategy.
I found the early sections about "teaching" to be particularly interesting. Kaufmann is claiming that decidophobia and the strategies for dealing with it are often taught by parents. In fact, Kaufmann claims that parents teach children to fear decisions because it is too hard to teach skills of "prudence [and] self-reliance" (sec 1). I wonder how often this occurs in teaching. Is statistical significance at the 95% confidence level a short-cut which is similar to fear of decisions? [Matt - I'm sure you can make some Bayesian joke here]
The section about religious authority - the fact that servants of the Church willingly sacrifice all autonomy - has me thinking about the role of authority at a university. The convent, the Army, and the factory are all institutions which insulate their members from most decisions, but the university seems to occupy a different space which allows greater autonomy. After all, students have the freedom to choose their own majors, eat on their own schedules, and more; however, they also have degree requirements and dining halls which provide some tangible limits to their choices. Does the institution of "universities" serve as a counterbalance to institutions such as the Army? Are rising tuition rates undermining the usefulness of universities to society by preventing potential students from choosing to attend?
At the end of Section 3, Kaufmann discusses two models of drifting as a form of decidophobia. Do you think drifting - or, even more broadly, decidophobia - is a relatively modern phenomenon? After all, for most of history, people were either serfs (too poor to have choices) or elites (able to command resources to the point of being unconstrained). The space of potential decisions is much greater today than it has been throughout history, and I think decidophobia must be a by-product of this.
This post is getting long, so I'll wrap up. I can't read section 5 without thinking of people who will say "the government will solve it" or "the market will solve it" with respect to any problem of society. Both ideologies provide their users with an excuse to avoid considering difficult questions. The 4th to last paragraph in section 6 (beginning with "Exegetical thinking is also exemplified...") seems important - it could easily be used to revive a discussion of the su'um - but I cannot put my finger on why. Hopefully you guys can help me with that.
14 comments:
"Is statistical significance at the 95% confidence level a short-cut which is similar to fear of decisions? [Matt - I'm sure you can make some Bayesian joke here]"
I think the institutional constraints are also important here, but point probably stands for many people. (Same goes for Bayesian 95% credence intervals!)
Asking what features of decidophobia are decidedly modern is an excellent question, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that serfs were too poor to have choices or that elites were unconstrained in theirs. Man was no poorer for thousands of years prior to the high middle ages and still managed to migrate all over the planet. Decidophobia may have played a role in the decision of different groups of Celts to migrate from Gaul to Ireland during the Iron Age.
The question for me is, how does decidophobia manifest itself in the consideration of (foregone) alternatives? I don't have an immediate answer, though decidophobia can't much of a problem when your survival is on the line, because if it is, you'll be weeded out of the gene pool. In that sense, decidophobia may be luxury of the modern era.
Bart mentioned that "decidophobia may be luxury of the modern era." We live in an age of unprecedented choice. I don't even think Kauffmann could have imagined the array of choices offered to today's American privileged undergraduates. And does it cause the average college student to roam the campus in bliss when they think of how lucky they are to have all these opportunities? It creates stress and worried conversations late into the night about "what should I do with my life??". Are people more content if they have less choice? Or does it vary a lot by personality?
Kaufmann's point is that decidophobia is self-imposed, a personal failing. It doesn't depend upon your choice set.
Could procrastination be a mild form of decidophobia? In the case of writing a paper, for instance, a student must make decisions of length, topic, etc. If so, can any of Kaufmann's strategies explain it?
And Bart, I do agree that I went too far in declaring that serfs had no choices and elites no constraints. Serfs had little autonomy and relatively few choices, but that's tremendously different than no choices. Thanks for pointing out my error.
Pete, your profile picture is really raising the bar on this blog. I'll go get one now.
Re: Procrastination
I just know that my brain will work to avoid tasks that are mentally taxing and writing a paper is definitely something my brain codes as "hard." I'm tempted to do 1000 little routine tasks instead. That could be mild decidophbia.
Procrastination certainly feels similar to decidophobia - the dread that accompanies doing whatever it is that we should be doing, but I don't think it is decidophobia. There's not really a big decision to be made, but what is there is a large amount of uncertainty about the outcome, and this is probably the key similarity with decidophibia. Anecdotal evidence: I find that I procrastinate on papers that I have little idea about what I'm going to write - otherwise I just get to writing.
Matt - that still sounds like decidophobia to me. If you already know the topic, the big decision of "what to write about" has been made. If you don't know the topic, that's where the biggest decision comes in, and that's the very decision you avoid by procrastinating!
And to Joy, even your decision to avoid tasks that are hard is similar to decidophobia. After all, a decidophobe is avoiding decisions (such as moral decisions) which are hardest.
When Kaffman says that the "immersion in microscopic decisions is one good way of avoiding fateful decisions." I feel like he's looking over my shoulder at the moment I sit down to write a paper but instead EVERYTHING becomes more interesting. I decide to check my email, facebook, twitter, I read a blog. These little decisions are intellectually easier than the work at hand. Procrastination is a method of avoidance, and then the pressure of the deadline arises to "stack the cards" and force us to make the tough choices.
Are deadlines a strategy to avoid decisions? In pure autonomy, we might put off certain tasks for too long (or forever?) so an external motivator (a parent, a professor, and employer) to make the decision for us. Our personal character increases (and we overcome decidophobia) as we become more capable of setting and maintaining our own deadlines without the enforcement of others.
I don't see decidophobia as being something that can be mild, as in the procrastination of schoolwork that's being discussed. From my reading of the sections, it seems like instances of decidophobia or limited to "fateful decisions", a term he uses repeatedly.
Procrastination might be correlated with decidophobia. If you are procrastinating, there has to be some degree of discontent or lack of connection with your work, because otherwise, you would not have procrastinated. You have failed to take action to fix the discontent, since it would be a hard one. So, procrastination persists.
Its still hard to imagine being purely undecidophobic. However, recognizing my priors, this might be because I am decidophobic to some degree, as is everyone I know.
Hey everyone!
Let me introduce myself first, I'm Niek, an undergraduate student of Erik studying Liberal Arts and focussing on Economics and Mathematics (I do philosophy as a hobby).
Firstly, may I excuse my absence the past few weeks due to an extremely busy period of rounding up this second academic year. I've read the large part of Chapter 1 and will soon add more comments, but I didn't want to keep you from an article I found the other day:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/24/alien-abduction-evolution-creationism
The author of 'When evidence is powerless' speaks of people who denounce empirical evidence that disprove their initial beliefs, perhaps caused by a decidophobia that keeps them from changing their beliefs. They rather live comfortably without having to question everything.
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