Let’s Flip a Coin?

I have written a lot about balancing different priorities including how one person may value different things than someone else. This week though, I was encouraging my kids to flip a coin to decide on something.

My two oldest both wanted to shower first, and logically only one of them could. Each kid was trying to argue that it was more important and valuable for themselves to go first. Except, as we learn from research on say pain scales, we cannot really compare something completely subjective between the kids like “how happy I’ll be if I get to go first versus how sad I’ll be if I have to go second.”

This is where flipping a coin, playing rock-paper-scissors, or anything random is our best solution (definitely as parents, maybe for the kids too). If it is impossible to know which option is better, a 50% chance of making the right choice is basically the best we can hope for. If we assume arguing makes people less happy, it is utilitarian to intervene as soon as possible and leave it to chance. (Since kids need to learn how to work out their differences, maybe this is less true… but in my example they had made no progress after about 5 minutes of “discussion”).

Historically I have used other rules to break the tie. If one kid is faster than the other, then going second is less-bad for the other kid and perhaps more fair. However, last time I used my parental authority and that rule, I found that both kids took about the same amount of time.

That is all I really have to say on this topic, but I am curious if there are other cases where this kind of logic applies. There are certainly other times when the quality of your decision can only vary a small amount, so it is not worth more than a moment to decide.

Are there other situations where flipping a coin is your best option?