Should You Learn More, or Go for It?

What do you do when you are faced with a decision, but you don’t have all the information you need? Unknowns come in two different types. Some are unknowable until the event has happened, like a coin toss. Other unknowns are things we haven’t yet figured out, but which we could learn through effort.

When making any kind of decision under uncertainty, we often lump these two categories of unknowns together in the analysis. However, it’s more effective to understand the impact of the knowable-but-unknown and decide if it is worth investing in learning more.

If you treat solving a problem as a one-shot task, anything you don’t know just has to be factored into your decision-making process. Say you are trying to decide which chef’s knife to buy, and you choose to order online. You will probably not be able to tell which option will fit your hand best, so you have to incorporate that unknown into how you make your choice. For me, that means I’m more likely to buy a cheaper option to avoid spending a lot of money on something I might not like.

Switching your thinking though, you might reframe the problem as needing to figure out which handles fit your hand. This reframe doesn’t solve the original problem of deciding which knife to buy. But it does move you a step closer to a good decision by splitting the task into learning more first, then making your choice.

This idea of splitting a single decision into a sequence of decisions is something people often already do. There are also mathematical frameworks for representing these multi-phase decision making problems. If it’s easy to gather the extra information you need, and you recognize that you need that knowledge, slowing down to learn is an obvious first step.

When you have both kinds of uncertainty at play though, it can make it hard to tell how much better your decision could be if only you know more. Similarly, if it takes a lot of effort to learn more, it may not be worth the work either. For example, I don’t worry nearly as much about whether a specific knife will “fit my hand” because I’ve found that isn’t actually an issue for me.

I think the best way to decide if you should learn more before you commit to solving a problem is to estimate how much that new knowledge could improve your decision. You also need to carefully assess how much investment it will take to get that improved information. With limited hours in the day, only some problems will be worth spending the time to learn more.

Luck, or the lack of it, can also compound the effects of the unknowable kind of uncertainty. If you make a good decision but are unlucky, you might wish you had done something else entirely. The key lesson is you can only ever judge the quality of a decision based on what was known at the time it was made.

You would never say someone picked the wrong lottery numbers. However, it is not a great choice to buy a lottery ticket the day after someone wins the jackpot. Even with the currently-unknown and the unknowable, we can evaluate whether it is time to learn more or simply commit to the best choice we can make in the present.