Fencing Thought Space

I’ve been thinking about optimal ways to go about making decisions.

In Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow he breaks down two processes of thinking, dubbed “System 1” and “System 2”. While System 2 is slow, methodical and deliberate, System 1 is fast, snappy, and quick to form judgements. In the context of our lives, System 1 is always running in the background, while System 2 lies idle, waiting to be engaged by System 1.

From my experience, I’ve noticed that whenever I try and think about making a decision, my thoughts are usually rather sporadic. I often jump between options haphazardly, at the whims of System 1. Thoughts fleet quickly through my mind and it can be tough to find a systematic way to go through decision making.

Something I’ve been doing subconsciously, but never had a name for was fencing thought space. Essentially this means providing boundary conditions to decision making in order to vastly decrease the space of options you need to consider.

Let’s illustrate what I mean by this with a simple example. Say you’re at a coffee shop, and you see 9 pastries on the shelf in front of you with differing costs and utility (satisfaction you get from consuming). How might you narrow down which pastry to ultimately pick?

Without fencing thought space I might consider each one independently and sporadically. Fleeting first from the enticing Apple Fritter to the Strawberry Muffin. At the whims of System 1, I might get distracted and go down a rabbit hole of remembering the first time I had a donut as a child or what kind of frosting they’re using on the cupcakes. This is inefficient, and using a process like this might lead me to a suboptimal choice. In this simple scenario the decision is of little importance in the grand scheme of things, but you can imagine how this decision can be scaled up to certain situations like choosing a job, buying a house, or deciding on a city to move to.

Instead, if I were to fence my thought space, I can vastly decrease the number of options to consider, thus giving me more time to thoughtfully analyze the options which are most realistic.

In the example above, we’ve “fenced” thought space by the following parameters: cost < 0.66, utility > 0.33. By simply applying the following constraints, we’ve decreased our decision space from 9 to 4. You can imagine that as the number of dimensions of comparison increased, this constraining technique on each dimension can exponentially decrease the decision space (thus increasing the speed at which you can methodically make decisions).

I’ve been trying to be more conscious of this process of though space fencing, applying it to more aspects in my personal life using my values, morals, goals, and purpose as constraining parameters.