vector of choices

[ Category - Mindset ] [ Category - Essays ]

You walk upon a locked door. It‘s your house door. Pat pat pat pat. Ah snap. You do not have a key. What do you do?

Your immediate decision space might look like
1. Call someone
2. Look for other doors
3. Check your bag again

Those are choices in a let's say neutral mindset.

Now let say you‘re absolutely livid. Just up-the-wall angry at that moment. Like you thought you won the lottery but instead it was the YTV show prank patrol. Damn ninjas.

It acts as an “angry filter”.

Your new immediate options are
1. Scream
2. Shout
3. Yell
And the like.

Let‘s say we had a complete action space, some astornomically large set of possible actions to take, given an environment, where the action is in the realm of physical reality and is something you could feasibly do.

It‘d be large, but it‘d be finite. A lot of the things would be super dumbo things. That‘s the majority of the stuff that‘s filtered out.

Some of them would be intelligence or creativity blocked. But I imagine the optimal solution isn‘t usually that difficult. Having the greatest number of options, to me, is thinking “clearly”.

Counterintuitively, the less you filter, the more clearly you think.

At first I was tempted to lump all emotion as filters which reduce action-space, but after some thought, that is provably not the case.

The age-old maxim of “needs create innovation” is clearly showing the case that some options only present themselves to a person when they are under great duress.

I‘m not sure about my conclusion on this essay.