Sortes vergilianae
In Ancient Rome, some people had a fun way to handle dilemmas:
- open a book by the poet Virgil
- flip to a random page
- read the page, and take it as guidance for your situation
That's it: sortes vergilianae, or "Virgilian Lots".
It's like throwing dice, reading a horoscope or praying for an omen. You "let Virgil choose", and functionally it's a way to introduce some randomness, offload some responsibility, and see what Lady Luck brings this time.
In dilemmas that aren't worth solving, this is a smart move!
Think about it: if you can't choose between two options—if it seems impossible to say what is best—they must be around equally good on net.
Right? Take a moment to consider if that makes sense.
Indecision is down to either a lack of sleep, or that your options come with different pros/cons. "Oh if I do this, person A will be mad, but if I do that, person B will be sad, and and and…" and there is no path that won't hurt, and at least if you postpone the decision, it's harder for others to blame you.
Hesitation is always easy, rarely useful.
—Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality chapter 66
So what do you do? Spin your wheels figuring out which pros/cons matter more, going around and around.
But why live like that? There's a difference between:
- That the choice is IMPORTANT (has a lot of impact)
- That the harder it is to pick a winner, the LESS important it is which option wins
It is possible for #1 to be true, and yet settle the choice with some dice.
It may feel… illegal, like you snubbed the IMPORTANT CHOICE, abandoned responsibility for it. Throwing dice or flipping a coin, these look like the actions of someone who doesn't care.
But throwing dice is owning up to the reality that you haven't found the information that would cast the choice in sharp relief, cladding one option above all in a golden halo. Owning up that you can't bend every choice so it comes out easy; not unless you bend your personality by all that rumination.
You're adulting successfully, because there's a cost in digging for a stroke of genius that settles the matter. You're mining where there's no ore, so it will take weeks to find iron.
The dice picked one set of pros/cons for you, now you eat those cons. Reward? Those pros.
I mentioned dilemmas that are "not worth solving". So which are?
Actually, none are worth solving!
It's in the name "dilemma": a choice where none of the options stick out, i.e. you see no obvious, automatic, default option.
Weirdly, the easier a choice, the more important it is to choose correctly. But you're going to! It hits you over the head. "Well, duh. Anything else would be stupid. Case closed."
Weirdly, the harder the choice, the less important it is to choose at all. Let the dice do it. Defer to Virgil.