Analysis paralysis

October 31, 2023

I read a comment on Hacker News that got me thinking about a “problem” that I have, or to be more precise whether it is a problem at all.

It can be framed as analysis paralysis, which is also what I have titled this piece. But in doing so we have already casted some form of judgment on it. Paralysis is hardly a positive framing.

But the commenter on HN had an interesting observation:

I have two young kids and I’m constantly humbled by how fearless they are. They will dive right into a project that’s way over their heads and just get it wrong until they get it right. My six year-old found my Lego Technic from 25 years ago and spent a whole month assembling a fully articulated, geared up, complex helicopter. He built it wrong maybe 15 times. But now he’s this absolute wizard at assembling Technic gear systems.

There’s this tremendous power in “not knowing what you don’t know” that sometime in university disappeared from me and now I have paralysis: what if I’m just being annoying? Will I embarrass myself? I don’t want to waste people’s time. Am I being pedantic? etc.

On first reading it I thought how right it is. How the naïvité of youth makes young people take on all sorts of challenges, which adults would not. In doing so the kids learn and grow. In contrast grownups analyze the task and takes a shorter route or avoids the task altogether as they have foreseen the potential outcome. By doing so I concluded that the curiosity of youth is lost and hence the adults live a “poorer” life.

I was just about to write that and ask for a way to switch of that “analysis” and instead throw myself at more projects, tasks etc.

But then it struck me that perhaps I had the wrong conclusion. Which is why I decided to write myself through the issue and see if I could get to a conclusion.

Because one of the defining differences between youth and adults is the ability to think through a situation and foresee the potential outcome. Is that not what we get out of all the things we throw ourselves at that fail as youths? Are we not exactly supposed to learn from all the naïve experiences and be better at selecting where to put our effort?

Are we better off thinking about the consequences or experiencing them?

This is where I think that there is no right answer.

I can think of scenarios where having the experience would be the better outcome as well as scenarios where that would not be the case.

There is probably some middle ground and a default that in my own case leans too far in the direction of analysis. But the experience and learning is also there and should be trusted.

The question I need to ask myself when my analysis ends up pointing in the direction of inaction is probably whether it points in that direction because of a road that leads me out of my comfort zone? Or because I can actually foresee a loss from the experience? And finally whether that loss is something I can live with and learn from or actually renders the experience not viable.