Why bring in quantum mechanics?
I bring up quantum mechanics for two reasons. First, making a decision has the effect of discretizing a continuous world. (Just as, in politics, a winner-take-all election converts a divided populace into a unidirectional mandate.) I see a strong analogy here to the collapsing of the wave function. To bring in a different physics analogy, decision-making crystallizes a fluid world into a single frozen choice. The second connection to quantum mechanics connection arises because decisions are not made in isolation, and when we wait on a decision, it tends to get “entangled” with other decisions, producing a garden of forking paths that is a challenge to analyze. At some point–even, possibly, before the “expected value of additional information” crosses the zero line–decisions get made, or decision-making gets forced upon us, because it’s just to costly for all concerned to live with all the uncertainty. (I wouldn’t say this is true of all decisions or even most decisions, but it can ar
