One of the core “features” of the human species is patern recognition. We all at some point made a decisions based on a previous experience that we have had. For example, you mostly likely have eaten in a mexican restaurant or more than one,and after eating that spicy food you most likely shat like a garden house. If that has happend to you in 3 different restaurants you will most likely assume that next time or in the next restaurant you will have the same experience.
Now, this is where some very important clarification says needed:
- Having one defect doesn’t make it bad
- If in general some thing tends to have a defect doesn’t mean that all of that thing will have the same defect
This is in theory, in practice a few things change, starting with the lack of personal experience. Most people start forming opinions and making assumptions based on the experiences of others. Instead of trying new things or go outside they instead scroll through many ideas and choose which one fits them best, or in a better but not good scenario they believe something or off fear. Fear is natural, but along side pattern really we developed intelligence, some might like to call that pattern recognition as well but that is a conversation for another day. With this intelligence we can remove the fear. Going in more detail:
Decisions based on copied patterns:
Using the same example as before, the restaurant. You might find yourself convinced not to go to some place because of a bad experience that someone else had, a friend or family. This is bad because one’s experience is not always the same as another’s. You might enjoy a food that somebody might dislike. Easiest example is of allergies, some people die while others enjoy it.
Decisions based on single/few experiences:
This is where fear tends to appear. Fear has many definitions but in this case the one that applies the most is: emotion presented by a lack of defense against the unknown. This fits best this scenario as the fear that comes from patterns shaped by few or single experiences that above that are not even personal, are hard or impossible to control or predict. To understand why is trivial, trying to create a pattern out of a single point of data is like trying to understand a picture by looking at a single pixel.
Now an important thing has to be mentioned, which could be considered to contradict the previous statements and definitions, but in reality just presents the last component of the equation that forms what decision making is. That last part is risk, and more specifically risk to reward ratio.
When you were young your parents most likely have told you not to go in a specific area of town because it is dangerous. Not because they were stolen from, not because they were stabbed, but because multiple people were stabbed there. You copy that pattern en reinforce it by not going into that area based on the experience of others. This is a case where copying a pattern is the best thing you can do, because the reward of saving a few seconds on your comute is not worth the risk of getting stabbed to death. That is risk to reward ratio. The problem comes when out of lack of actual bad experiences, or worse, too many bad experiences, the risk/reward ratio compass breaks.
Now after presenting all these objective truths, I will state my opinion on the matter:
Risk is part of evolving, doesn’t matter if it is concesly taken or by mistake, but when a decision comes, always choosing not to risk will keep you right where you are. On the other side risks shouldn’t be taken like a gamble, they should be calculated. Finding the balance between the two is where actual personal experience comes and something that you shouldn’t be thought and is where the current problem in society is, from the start kids are no longer left to discover and explore their personal risk to reward ratio. Instead they are thought in school or at home how to set their personal risk to reward ratio without going trough the correct and complete process of actually experiencing life and understanding how patterns actually form.