Mental Wealth Podcast

Rob 

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mental Wealth Podcast. We are so delighted today to welcome back Emily Pabst from RemakeTheRules.com. Emily has been a guest of ours a few times now and today we’re going to be speaking about choice inflation.  

For ad-free episodes of the Mental Wealth Podcast, head to  mentalwealthpod.gumroad.com.  

Emily, how’s things? 

Emily 

Hi, they’re doing good. Thank you for having me back. 

Rob 

You’re very welcome. It’s great to see you. And yeah, I just thought I’d get right into it. What is choice inflation? Let’s start there. What are we talking about here? 

Emily 

Sure. Yeah. Choice inflation is a term that I’ve coined in an attempt to better explain and talk about this feeling that I think so many people are experiencing of having way more choices to make and also having to process way more information for each of those choices. So it is just this acceleration of choice making and information processing that I think many of us are experiencing. 

Rob 

Do you think there’s an example there of too many choices giving people freedom or you think there’s a level of anxiety to you? What do you think the balance is there? 

Emily 

I am very optimistic about this era of disruption that I think folks are going through, that the information landscape that we are all attempting to navigate and make decisions with inside of and process has a great capacity for wonderful improvement in day-to-day lives and also on grander scales for societies, for governments, for communities. So yes, I absolutely believe that having more choices can be a huge benefit. But I also acknowledge that it requires a ton of labor to manage. So that is sort of why I think it is important and valuable to sort of name and identify choice inflation, this experience that we are all kind of undergoing. where so much of our lives are changing. So a lot of the old routines that maybe we used to rely on just don’t work anymore, or we are choosing to try to grow from them, a wall from them. And yeah, it’s a lot of work, right? So I think that the benefit is there, but there’salso some real serious pitfalls, including having decision fatigue, having information overload, and really being paralyzed by uncertainty. 

Rob 

Can you speak to some of the knock-on effects of that information overload? I assume a lot of business owners, people that are dealing with these operational decisions, I as someone that does not own a business are facing information overload. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for business owners. Could you speak to some of the challenges that people are facing in this new environment? 

Emily 

Yeah, absolutely. I have a real special place in my heart for small business owners because of the kind of incredible span of responsibility that they end up taking on, right? That they’re often like a one-person team or a small team or in charge of a very small team. And there is just a lot, right? So as you say, as an individual who maybe doesn’t have the responsibility of making every choice for a business, you already feel overwhelmed, right? And so it definitely is, I think, what I feel for most folks who carry a cell phone around in their pocket, right? If you live in a society where you have a supercomputer in your pocket, then you are almost experiencing what I call the cycle of exhaustion. So it starts with uncertainty, you know, where we are like, I want to learn more about the world. I want to take care of myself better. I want to run my business better, but I don’t know how. So what we do is we create what I call choice tech, information management tools that help us decide. But those choice tech tools often are not actually helping us. They are leading to choice inflation. So now we are kind of right, the cycle of exhaustion is happening. That increased level of choices, the increased information processing is going to lead to information overload. because we are just really struggling to keep up with the quantity of information and choices that we have to make. And then we find ourselves in decision fatigue, analysis paralysis, and then we’re kind of back at uncertainty again. Solike we have not resolved any of the discomfort that we were feeling from uncertainty. We have just expanded the noise that is happening in our head and the amount of decisions that we are trying to make. And it’s a really, really tough cycle to be in. 

Rob 

Do you think the pure quantity of data that people are trying to process is getting us further and further away from quality of results? 

Emily 

I think that there is a gap in skill set. We humans are tool makers and we’re great at it. We love tools. We create tools to solve all kinds of problems. Many of them are physical material tools, to help us grind wheat or whatever, to help us make bread. But a lot of them are social technologies too. The advent of histories, you know, that we are creating stories to help us organize and understand about the past. That we have created ideas about geography and nation states to help us organize into communities. And we have also created a social technology to manage very high levels of information. And that social technology is statistics. But we cannot all be statisticians. I do not recommend that for folks, right? But it is this strange tension where we are encountering, like you say, an extraordinarily high volume of information without the skills to really be able to parse it and process it on our own. And what I do is help people to bring in the probabilistic thinking that statistics works with. And so folks like don’t have to become statisticians, do not have to become mathematicians. but can sort of start thinking more probabilistically, can start thinking about what is the likelihood that what I am seeing, reading, feeling, thinking is indeed accurate? What is the likelihood that it is going to sort of result in the outcomes that I believe it to be? What is the likelihood that I have enough information to make a good choice for me in this instance? And that is sort of a way for folks to kind of meet that volume and to meet it successfully and positively. 

Rob 

Is there carryover between, say, a decision like a dating app and a business decision where someone has to decide whether they’re hiring or firing someone? Is there a through line between that process that works in both sort of decision-making models? 

Emily 

Oh, absolutely. One of the early steps would just be a consideration of, is this information telling me what I think it is? Based on what I know about how this person is working with a team, what their productivity is, do I have the information available to me to accurately make choices about whether or notto hire, fire, promote, what have you about this person? So that sort of foundational evaluation of the information is going to be a huge aspect of any place. Same with online dating, for example. Like if somebody says that they are X age, then I assume that they are at this stage of their life, right? That they are at this stage of their maturity. And that might not actually be a very good surrogate, kind of depending on the person, depending on the situation. We have a pattern but not necessarily something that is well guaranteed. So it is doing that sort of evaluation of the information at hand. Is it valid? Is it reliable? Is it telling me what I think it is telling me? And is there an actual pattern that I can apply to multiple people to multiple situations? that I can sort of build a new decision-making process off of. 

Rob 

Filtration process then, right? Distilling it down into exactly what you’re looking for in terms of objective, and then using those data points to finalize that decision. That’s interesting. 

Emily 

Yeah, evaluating a filtration system. Am I appropriately filtering for the outcomes that I think I’m filtering for? 

Mukund 

If somebody is overwhelmed with choice, I know it depends on the situation, depends on circumstances, but in general, is there any suggestions you can share? 

Emily 

For sure. You are absolutely correct that it is very dependent on the person and their situation. But something that I see in, I think, every single person that I’ve talked to that can benefit them is to take a moment and really verify that the problem that you think you’re solving is a problem. A lot of the tools that are now available to us can amplify our experience of a problem that we have or amplify an experience of a problem that we don’t actually have, because that is a way to get us to use them, to connect, to give our attention to them, to give our business to them. And they’ve gotten quite sophisticated and good at it. So to sort of take that moment and say, what is the actual problem that I am trying to solve here? And is it real? And is it as immediate, as an urgent as I am feeling it to be? Because I think in many cases, people can start kind of stepping back from some of these problems and stepping back from some of that urgency, which then gives them a little more space to evaluate better, to slow down a little bit, or to just be like, what, never mind. In the scale of problems in my life, I am dropping this off the list, right? I’m going to just focus on the top 10, you know, screw number 35. And that sort of gives them a little extra, boost a little extra energy to refocus on those 10. 

Mukund 

And in a business setting, earlier you mentioned small businesses go through this problem as well. Were you talking about choices they have as a business? Do they have choices as the products they can buy, solutions they can buy, or is it more internal managing their own process, their own employees? 

Emily 

Like top to bottom, and I can give an example of each for the external problem solving, is this idea that there are so many solutions that are getting brought to people and saying, oh, you know, here’s a solution, here’s a solution. And then it makes the person pause and be like, oh, do I need that solution? Do I have that problem? Right? So that’s kind of going into that example of the built-in urgency that is maybe not something that we feel, but it’s being put on us. And then internally, I think one of the biggest challenges that we’re all kind of facing, including small business owners, is that these choice tech tools are rearranging how we encounter information, including how we communicate with each other. So it is having huge changes on how information is. documented, contained, shared with each other, all the way from emails to Slack or Teams environments to process documentation. That kind of, like that was already incredibly challenging. And now there are so many different tools and methods and potentially different needs to do that, there’s just a lot of catch up there, a lot of confusion and a lot of overwhelm and overload. 

Mukund 

We spoke earlier in a social setting. We covered some ideas on not doing social media when looking for dates. How could that help if you are not doing it? Are you at a loss, even though it might be overwhelming? Is more information bad in a certain sense, or is less information good? In general, people tend to think that the more I know, the better it is, right? So Do you have any thoughts or suggestions on how they can approach them? 

Emily 

As far as a person trying to choose and decide how they’re kind of connecting with and learning about other people, yeah, and the huge, like not just online dating, not just in person, but the, you know, quote unquote online stalking that we can do of a person as well. Yeah, We can kind of take it back to an evaluation of the information at hand and what it is doing for you? are you doing a deep dive on this person to, which I would say is often the case, to relieve some sort of discomfort that you feel that doesn’t necessarily have to do with building a connection or relationship with this person. And kind of taking a little bit of time to say, what am I attempting to manage with this added information? Am I trying to control the situation by removing uncertainty. If that is the case, like I got bad news for you. People very replete with uncertainty. It’s not going to resolve that. That being said, are there some things that are critically important to know about another person before you make certain commitments with them? There are, right? Are you likely to learn that from a LinkedIn page? I do not believe so. How are we going to get there? What is the actual functional ave for acquiring that information in order to make those critical choices for yourself that you can be safe, that you can be heard, right? And figuring out how to know and understand that information. 

Mukund 

It’s interesting you say that because from what I’ve heard, companies interviewing candidates, they go through like 5, 6 rounds of interviews, which I think is ridiculous. 

Emily 

The hiring process right now is so fascinating. Like definitely one of the most interesting problems that I enjoy working on because you can, like it’sincredibly, it’s a total mess right now, right? Like AI is adding this whole level of complication from an employer standpoint. that, again, it was like a system that we were already not doing great, still just barely figuring out, working on, and really hard to get our feet under us because all these changes keep happening. And so you can tell that there is sort of this frenzy to correct, to improve, But how to do that, right, is the $1,000,000 question. And I think that it is, again, managing this uncertainty, right, trying to figure that out, bringing in all these choice tech tools to try to figure it out. And there is still that lack of the elicitation skills, right, of figuring out how to actually achieve and get the information that you need in order to make that choice better. which really comes down to the types of questions that you ask and how you ask them. If you don’t ask the right questions, it doesn’t matter how many interviews you do. You’re still not going to know. 

Rob 

I think it’s difficult for a lot of people to recognize when the narrative of a choice is false. How can people recognize the signs when they’d be given false dichotomy between this and that and really there is no choice? Is there signs where people can sort of go, okay, I’ll step back from this because I already know exactly what I want. In your experience, Emily, is there a science people look for in the idea of you’re being led to a certain conclusion here? Step back. 

Emily 

Yes. Dating is maybe my favorite example for this sort of false choices or these otherwise would not be empowered pieces of information. Yes. that a dating app profile often has sort of these discrete buckets, like what are you looking for, what your level of education is, right, what your height is, whatever. And it’s maybe 10, it’s maybe 15 or less. And because they are available to you, are kind of defaulting into making those things valuable. You might not care at all. about those things. But because you only know 20 pieces of information about this person, you are highlighting and highly valuing all 20 pieces of those information, even though you might only care about one. 

Rob 

That’s such a good point. 

Emily 

This is where it’s really helpful to know yourself and to know what you want. Like before you wade deeply into these systems, because it is pretty easy to default to what they give us, what they provide to us, because we’re so overwhelmed, because we want it to be easier. So to kind of be able to manage that tension between the collaboration and the kind of outsourcing your information and your decision making to these tools, and then taking a step back and being like, is there real alignment here? Is this actually what I care about and what I am interested in? And kind of being able to switch back and forth in between that re-identifying where I started and where I want to go and the extent to which this tool is kind of helping me get there. 

Rob 

I always think about the first thing you see on a dating profile is usually for guys, it’s their height and things like that. I always think about the pointlessness of that kind of information, because most guys are going to say they’re 6 foot tall, regardless of whether they’re 5’11 or 5’9 or 5’10, yet every guy is 6 foot online. You’re not only telling people to create this false idea themselves, but you’re also giving the recipient a false idea with the person they’re looking at on the dating profile. The point you make about the data they’re seeing is exactly right, is you’re giving them the false principle of what’s important, because obviously, whether someone’s 5’9 or 5’11, you probably wouldn’t know to look at them anywhere, right? So I’ve been told a lot of women choose guys based on height. So it’s an interesting idea. 

Emily 

This is like, you know, like there’s so much going on with that example and like the gamifying of it to be like, we all know what the patterns and expectations are. So it’s like this arms race of being like, well, I’m going to say I’m a little taller so I can trick someone who is already making incredibly arbitrary choices about partnership so that they meet me and then they’re going to raise the bar, and it’s just kind of like, again, let’s talk about the information available to you and what you’re looking for. Every choice has a consequence. And this is how I talk to folks, regardless if it’s dating, regardless if they are leading a huge organization, regardless if they’re a small business owner. Your choices have consequences, and it is up to you to get okay with them. Like, are they acceptable to you or not? So if you want to date someone that’s 7 feet tall, you are allowed to make that choice 100%. It will take out 99.5% of the population. That is the consequence of that choice. And the only thing it will give you is someone that’s 7 feet tall. So again, if that is like what is most valuable to you in this decision-making structure, you did it. You nailed it. But those are the consequences of it. And people are allowed to build those structures however they want and however works for them. 

Mukund 

It’s like what you wish for kind of a warning. 

Emily 

For sure. Right? Same for hiring, same for making strategic choices for an organization like you are more than allowed to prioritize counting this one widget above everything. Absolutely. And counting that one widget exclusively will come with consequences. But if that is the goal, that is the goal. 

Rob 

What do you think about companies that are using these AI tools now to analyze candidates before they even get to the interview? That obviously has an impact on the decisions that are eventually made and the person they’re eventually hired. 

Emily 

I see a really big spectrum between organizations who have arguably figured out what the job does. And everything is written with that in mind. The job description says what the job does. Whatever system they are using to filter out candidates is based on the job description, what the job does. But That is not the same as what it takes to do the job well. So I think like for me, that is very often the biggest discrepancy, even before we get to conversations about whether or not the tool is doing what you think it’s doing. It’s like, well, you’re already counting the widgets of years of experience, but not necessarily skills. So we’ve got to sort of reform that whole thing before we can delegate that filtering to anything, because we still are not even using maybe the correct language or framing to figure out how to actually achieve the work and not just describe the work. 

Rob 

I love that because the idea is… You’re not getting the right result if you start from a process of filtering out people that probably would have been perfect for the job, but you didn’t get the right keyword on the resume, or they didn’t have the right seven years versus 8 years of experience in this particular software that’s exactly right. Emily, I really appreciate you sort of explaining a lot of these concepts of choice inflation to me. I don’t have a great deal of experience with it, but I’m obsessed with this kind of topic, and I think it’s going to be hugely valuable to people, not only in the long term, but in the near term too. I think these technologies and these topics are increasing in value and just so important to speak to someone with your knowledge and experience. And I just want to thank you for your time today, and I really appreciate it. Thank you. 

Emily 

Absolutely. 

Rob 

Bye for now.