Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

The primary reason why we have evolved to satisfice in our particularly human way is because we are making decisions in a world of uncertainty, and the rules for making decisions in such times are completely different from those when you have complete and perfect information. If you need to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle and you know one interior angle and the length of the other two sides, you can be perfectly correct, and many problems in mathematics, engineering, physics and chemistry can achieve this level of certainty. However, this is not appropriate to most of the decisions we have to make. Such questions as whom to marry, where to live, where to work, whether to buy a Toyota or a Jaguar or what to wear to a conference don’t submit to any mathematical solution. There are too many future unknowns and too many variables, many of which are either not mathematically expressible or measurable. Another good example of a decision that has to be taken subjectively is whether we choose to buy an economical or a high-performance car. In general there is a trade-off between these two attributes. Do you sacrifice economy for performance or performance for economy?