July 13th 2025

The Goal Is to Think as Little as Possible (without Ever Being Wrong)

Thinking is an exhausting activity that you should maximally avoid. It eats up your energy and your time. There is a relevant precept in computing that can be stated like this: if you could get the result without running the program, then you never had to run the program in the first place.

You apply forms of this rule throughout your life each day. Like if you've eaten some plant before, you don't need to test yourself to see if you're allergic to it before you eat it again. Or if a friend has shown you that you can trust them, you don't need to hook them up to a polygraph before you tell them your latest secret.

It's smart to navigate the world in this way, using shortcuts based on what you choose to assume you're right about. Imagine if each time you wanted to turn on a lamp in your home, you first insisted on hiring an electrician to check all your wiring. Nothing would ever get done!

But when does this heuristic-craft break down?

That is harder to say. It happens at some point between assuming you haven't developed a blueberry allergy since you had blueberry pancakes for breakfast and demanding that each person you ever meet for lunch submit to a background screening.

Mistakes will be made, naturally. Consider: blueberries are delicious, and despite the early warning signs of a burgeoning allergy, you may push through until you are in a full-blown anaphylactic shock. You could also meet someone charming and because you like the way they make you feel, take them to be a truth-teller, someone you can count on, someone who means well by you.

And you may be wrong. Even worse than that, worse than being wrong, you may be wrong and primed to shut out all the evidence that's there for you to see you're wrong.

Remember that it's smart to navigate the world in this way. You know what you know, and that's usually very helpful.

I remember once when I was twelve or thirteen, I microwaved myself a frozen Elio's pizza. I had rented a movie I wanted to see, Road to Perdition starring Tom Hanks. Hanks: he had starred in some of my favorite movies up to that point. Forrest Gump, Apollo 13. Everyone was saying that Road to Perdition was a quality movie too. I had every reason to look forward to it. I would plop down on the couch with my pizza and enjoy.

Except, I gave myself food poisoning. I didn't cook the pizza long enough or the pepperonis had gone bad. Instead of watching the movie, I spent the whole night slouched over a metal bowl. The two-day rental period came and went. It was almost twenty years later that I finally sat down and watched Road to Perdition, which I enjoyed just as much as I thought I would when I was a teenager. All these years later, I still haven't had an Elio's pizza. The thought of it makes me queasy, even though I know that the odds of getting sick from one again are no higher than the odds of getting sick eating any frozen pizza.

It's safe to assume that once your feelings get involved (I like this person, that scares me, that makes me excited, that made me sick, etc.), bias has sunk in. You're abiding by that all-helpful rule and thinking as little as possible, to save your time and energy for all the situations you actually need to think.

There's the problem. You can't know whether or not you needed to run the program until after you run it.

Maybe, just maybe, the blueberries you've always digested just fine will cause you hives the next time you eat them. Or the person you've taken as your hero will turn out to have been a villain all along. Maybe Elio's, after a twenty-year break, will make the best pizza I've ever eaten. Then that handy trick (Elio's → Road to Perdition → sick) will have turned out to be a handy blindspot, which isn't so handy at all.

Solution: become an expert at knowing when it's necessary to think. Failing that, err on the side of sometimes thinking even when it's unnecessary.