Longitude 0'0'0"
My mother Marian and I went down to Greenwich yesterday to visit the Cutty Sark; the Maritime Museum; the market; a couple of pubs (the Coach and Horses and the Gipsy Moth); and the Royal Observatory. The latter is of course on longitude 0'0'0", where the eastern hemisphere ends and the western hemisphere begins. As people of all nationalities danced over the meridian line like the pre-cognizant monkeys of Kubrick's 2001 I thought about the moment when some Englishman arbitrarily decided that the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was the centre of the world. What did it take? Arrogance? National pride? I thought some more, and I realised that the making of arbitrary decisions takes one thing above all: courage.
One of my favourite fables concerns a hungry donkey. This donkey, finding himself equidistant between two equally desireable bales of hay, looks left and right, unable to decide which bale to eat first. The donkey dies of starvation. Like our donkey, I sometimes find it hard to make what seems like an arbitrary decision. The fear of making the wrong choice weighs heavily. I might attempt to rationalise, concocting reasons why one choice is better, but in the end it's courage that averts starvation.
On a slightly related topic, I came across this link via BoingBoing. It appears that cognitive scientists have shown that the average human can track just four mental variables when trying to solve a problem. That could explain why I'm such a reckless chessplayer.
How to decide?
When weighing up choices it's hard enough to decide what to do even when using only rational / quantifiable factors.
Then there is intuition - sometimes you find yourself just doing what feels right, despite the rational brain in protest over something ignored.
There is the possibility that there are not two, but many potential choice options - each with it's own variety of practical and personal factors to consider. I reckon that even when you think you are making your own decisions, you will also be thinking of who else this affects, and may have an interest in influencing the outcome.
When we bought our house, we had a checklist of all the things we wanted, needed, tried to weigh up the relative importance of etc. and in the end chose the place with most (but not all) of the essentials, and the right feel.
And last week, trying to work out if it is better to hire a new but cheap trumpet, or buy an old but maybe better instrument, I felt all confused. Until I saw the lovely old German silver trumpet in a little case that said "dear old Grandad in the local band" - and came over all decisive! Also, the boy in question gets a pretty nice sound out of it!
STV voting system
Our new municipal/health board voting system has the nice feature that if two candidates are tied in the election, then the winner is decided randomly.
Of course its more complex than that, and its only pseudo-randomly, but having played around with the algorithms since late 2001 its still kinda amusing/satisfying - lots of the election design things seem to have so many alternative rules that any set you choose are in some sense arbitrary - so having a random selection as the last alternative seems appropriate.
BTW: I'm sure that I'm the only person so far to mis-read the title of the article as "the courage to be actuary"