Making Fast Decisions

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I am here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're going to start by discussing test and trace.

Speaker B: 00:00:27

Peter. We're going to start with, what are we going to do afterwards?

Speaker A: 00:00:31

Well, it's because, well, we can talk about it later, but yeah. Peter, lead us in.

Speaker C: 00:00:38

I have to say, I do quite like the fact that we don't actually talk about the thing we say we're going to talk about. I feel like that's our thing.

Speaker B: 00:00:44

Yeah, I think that's kind of the funny thing. There's a juxtaposition between the topic we say we're going to talk about, the thumbnail, and then what we actually talk about.

Speaker C: 00:00:55

Because what we talk about is the real issue, the interesting thing, the Alephy thing, which it's almost, and I quite like that. It's like we're saying, yeah, we're having a big conversation about how to make effective, fast decisions. That is talking about test and trace, right? But you don't realise. If you want to know about test and trace, just look it up. Boring. We're talking about the real issue, which is about this other thing. So why don't we just say we're talking about the real issue, which I know why, actually. Because it works. It's fun. It's like saying, okay, so we're going to have a big, long conversation about lollipops, and then we spend ages going into lots of detail about the economics of sugar production. That's what's fun about it. I like the fact that it's...

Speaker A: 00:01:33

And this week, we're discussing test and trace. Peter, lead us in.

Speaker B: 00:01:41

Okay, so this is about a report that was published by the Public Accounts Committee in March this year about test and trace, which is the UK's effort to test people, trace their contacts, and alert people about coronavirus, and try to stem the spread of the virus, try to control it, try to understand where it's going, and that sort of thing. This report looks at... So for non-UK listeners or for uninformed UK listeners, the Public Accounts Committee is a body of MPs, a select committee of MPs in Parliament. Its job is to oversee government expenditure, basically to... It's cross-party, I presume. Cross-party, should be fairly... It's supposed to be pretty neutral. And their job is to try to make government spending more effective and more honest, try to ensure transparency and accountability, make sure public money is not being misappropriated.

Speaker C: 00:02:42

Just as an aside, it's the one committee that strikes fear into the heart of every civil servant, because it's the only committee that civil servants can be called to account at. So, you know, it's the scariest thing any permanent undersecretary will ever have to do. Right, right, right, right, right.

Speaker B: 00:03:01

So their job... Obviously, they've been looking into Test and Trace to see if it's been good value for money, if it's having the effect it should be having, et cetera, et cetera. But the report is not particularly favourable, mainly because the headline is that the report says that there's no or little evidence that the scheme has actually had any positive impact in curbing the virus. Now, that might be because it's very difficult to sort of test that, measure that, because we don't know what would have happened if we didn't have Test and Trace. But it does comment on the fact that the metrics and the measures that Test and Trace kind of publish are really about the number of tests that they performed, rather than trying to account for how effective that has been at curbing the virus. Now, this is interesting, and it's very topical at the moment. But it occurred to me that this is an interesting question, because this Test and Trace regime process was set up very, very quickly, has had a lot of bad press and a lot of sort of a lot of criticism.

Speaker A: 00:04:18

It's cost a huge amount of money. Andy, have we said that? How much did it cost?

Speaker B: 00:04:22

Astonishing amount of money. So, its budget is £37 billion over two years. And that was sort of originally set up as £20 billion, I think, and then it was uplifted by £17 billion. So, it's quite a big public expense, quite a lot of money going into it. Criticism in the public press is about how much it's being spent. It's all been contractors and all the contractors earning £1,000 a day. Oh, my God, that's terrible. But actually, who else was going to do it? You're not going to suddenly find thousands of civil servants to do it. And anyway, they probably wouldn't have been any more cost effective. So, there's a lot of money being spent on this. But the question it raised in my head was, is it possible, and if it is possible, what's the best way of going about making big spending decisions like this, setting up this sort of thing fast? So, within a week, within a month of needing to set something up to try and curb coronavirus, what would be the process for making that big decision, that big spending decision?

Speaker A: 00:05:34

Okay, okay. Yeah, because this is what governments have to do, right? They have big decisions to make that affect millions of lives. They have at their disposal all sorts of resources. So, how can that process best work? Nick, what are your thoughts on this?

Speaker C: 00:05:56

Well, I'm not as ready. I mean, I love the Public Accounts Committee, and I'm always on their side if there's a fight between them and some stupid department wasting money. But I don't think we're in a position, and I will admit that I haven't read this report. I've only read reporting about the report. But I don't think we're really in a position to sort of work out what the effect has been. I mean, I have to say, when they started rolling out mass testing, I did express puzzlement at the time as to how this was going to stop it spreading. And everyone said, well, you test people. But actually, you know, the problem is, by the time you're testing people, they've probably done all this work of spreading the virus anyway. So, I'm never quite clear exactly what the business case is behind, you know, if we test, we can, I mean, what it enables you to do, and what it in fact enabled us to do was to bring in a lockdown probably a bit timelier than we would have done if we hadn't been testing people.

Speaker A: 00:06:51

Well, hold on for a second. Hold on. Because I'm interested. Let's think about this. Because as essentially a layperson in this, i.e. you, I mean, I'm trying to wonder who is in the room and what departments, what stakeholders that make that decision happen around test and trace, right? Because you, I mean, and I guess there might have been people like you, strategists. I mean, I don't know, you know, if you were back in...

Speaker C: 00:07:17

It doesn't really matter. Well, all I'm saying is that, is that the case, the case that was made, or at least there was this kind of gap in the case where it was like, look, if we test lots of people, then we can stop the virus before it gets out of the, you know, before we can shut the door before the horse is bolted. And I always, it always struck me as very optimistic that you could do that. I mean, there's obviously value in having test data, obviously, because you can find out what's, what the virus is up to. And it gives you a chance to adjust policy. But I think the idea that what you'd be able to do is identify all the people who had it using, using test and trace and get them all to stay indoors. It seemed pretty...

Speaker B: 00:08:12

I want to hear from Peter. It was set up with an assumption that testing was going to get better and testing that sort of the test, the time between, between sample taken and result, result found would have, would shrink. And I think now they can get it down to hours.

Speaker C: 00:08:27

Yeah, right. So if I just want to carry on with saying what I'm saying, right. Agreed. Yeah, I know all that. The point is that the effect it's going to have had is not something where we can say, oh, there was a second lockdown, therefore it failed. All we, the point is that the effect it's going to have had is going to be some sort of quantitative one. It will have, in some way, will have, will have, will have slowed the spread of the virus or something and potentially save lives. Because, you know, then we, we have fewer people die of it and until we get the vaccine. Right. So you see where I'm going. I'm just saying that the effect it will have had is going to be a quantitative one and not as the reports that I've read are saying is, oh, we had two, two more lockdowns, so therefore it can't have worked. What it would have, what it would have done is had some dampening effect, but we don't know what that is. Right. Because we don't have the counterfactual.

Speaker A: 00:09:17

We don't have another UK where they didn't have test and trace and we can say for sure, you know. Nick, it is relevant because is it, do you think it would be possible to voice that same opinion that you've given now at the time to say, you know, look, I don't think this is going to work isn't because of. I haven't just said it didn't work. No, no, no, listen. If that is not going to work in terms of lag because of the lag in terms of of spreading, slowing the spread of coronavirus. But it would have given us. But this will give us data. And that's useful to have. Right. But I think that's not the argument I'm making. What I'm saying is that what I'm saying is that is that we don't know whether test and trace worked. That's all I'm saying. That is basically the gist of what I'm saying.

Speaker C: 00:10:06

Well, I'm saying there's a priori. Right. I didn't quite understand what the argument was that this was going to have a significant effect. But forget about that. We're not a priori. We're a posteriori now. And I'm saying that now we don't we just don't know whether or not what effect it had. It definitely had some effect. Right. Because my uncle got contacted by them and told to stay indoors for two weeks, which he did. So and there must be lots of people like that. So it must have had some effect.

Speaker B: 00:10:34

I texted you to that effect, Nick. And, you know, stay away for two weeks. It achieves the aim of inconveniencing your uncle. But beyond that. So that's that's kind of the criticism of the report. The report is saying they publish lots of data, which is good. You know, well done. But it's all it's data on like how many people have been tested and that sort of thing. What it's not doing is is looking at ways of measuring its own effectiveness and publishing that data. Yeah. So your point about we don't know if it's had an effect is exactly what this report kind of what the number one conclusion recommendation is saying is you need they need to look at that as well.

Speaker C: 00:11:09

Sure. But all of this is a bit incidental because we what we really want to talk about is this question of how could it could it have been done better? So let's pretend that we know.

Speaker A: 00:11:19

That's what I'm trying to ask.

Speaker C: 00:11:19

Yeah. But let's let's pretend that we know it was it hasn't worked right, which I don't accept. It has worked. But the question is whether or not the extent to which it's worked is worth the 37 billion quid we've spent on it. Right. So let's assume as well that the government had to act quickly and didn't really have time to do things properly. Inverted commas. I don't really accept that either. But this question of like fast decision making and whether it can be done well and that sort of thing. So I suppose let's say that there are at least two types of decision making which we might want to think about. So there's the cognitive type of fast decision making about which quite a lot has been written. There's been a lot more written than there are actual facts and data about it. But whether or not people make better decisions if they act quickly and under what circumstances. And then I think more pertinent to this case is, you know, how what happens with organisations and whether or not they can make decisions quickly and whether or not acting quickly is better or worse. And if so, by how much?

Speaker A: 00:12:29

And presumably, and this is, you might have said it there directly and I might have missed it, but you know, in what situations do you want a quick decision? Is it a decision might be necessary, but does it have to be a quick decision? Right. And also what constitutes quick?

Speaker C: 00:12:45

Yeah, exactly. So I think with just to take the cognitive case almost to kind of ride roughshod over that and get beyond it. This question of whether or not you would think a priori that's quick decisions can only be worse because you've got less information. But the whole, there's a whole kind of body of cognitive psychology really looking at looking at the ways that people make decisions and whether or not actually sometimes spending time thinking about something makes your decision worse. And there's that book by Malcolm Gladwell, which is pretty terrible, but it's quite a good read. But it doesn't make any sense blink, which makes the argument that actually a lot of experts have their sort of intuition, which they immediately come to is often correct. But then they can then start spending too long thinking about the information they have in a sort of conscious way and then override their previously correct intuition. And he's got all kinds of anecdotal examples about that, like from firefighters and art experts and stuff where they're trying to judge a forgery. So, yeah, so there's, I think there's, but I mean, in general, I think that's really only true of a very few specific situations, which are where you have a lot of expertise in something, but crucially that you're able to get feedback, fairly immediate feedback. So, you know, if you're a firefighter, you can see what happens after you've seen, you know, after you've seen situation A and it's followed by situation B, you can assimilate that information, even though there may be, it may be something very complex and difficult for you to articulate and not reducible to some set of rules. You know, you're clearly assimilating a lot of information and able to identify connections between, you know, a cause and effect. But anyway, there's a lot of debate about it. And I think in general, I think a lot of people were a bit annoyed that it seemed like Malcolm Gladwell was kind of saying, hey, your intuition is great, trust your intuition, which isn't true at all, unless you're a real expert and about something where, if you like, there is very good training data. So, you know, let's put anyway, let's put that aside. I thought I'd mention it because that's relevant to sort of fast decision making in general. But this question of organisations, right, and the extent to which they can be fast or slow or good or bad. I've struggled, as always, whenever you look at anything to do with organisations and business, all you get, all you can find on the internet is, you know, terrible business articles and grey literature and survey data and dubious frameworks called things like no think do and anecdotes and very little in the way of data. I think we may be in the business of trying to reason from first principles, because I can't really, I can't find, you know, any studies really, which have tried to look at the speed of an organisational decision and the extent to which it's good. Only my own kind of analysis of looking at sort of think when big decisions go wrong, my feeling, and I feel like this is the situation with test and trace, is that it's not actually time that's the problem. Like, I mean, with test and trace, you could, in the space of a couple of hours, sketch out some boundaries for what the costs and benefits might be and what sort of magnitude of effect you would have to have, you know, what sort of saving you would need in terms of lives. It's not, you know, that's not, it's not, it's not like you've got to spend ages gathering data, is what I'm saying. It's not because normally that's the slow bit in decision making is acquiring information, but there wasn't any information to acquire here. You know, it's something that they could have done and presumably didn't. So, I don't really think this is about, there's not that trade off. And I think in most big, big decisions which go wrong, I would say the classic example would be something like the Titanic, you know, not putting enough lifeboats on the Titanic. It's not because they didn't have time to add the lifeboats. It's because they just didn't think about the situation or they dismissed the possibility that, you know, it could sink.

Speaker A: 00:17:17

There's questions I want to ask, but I think I want to bring in you, Peter. What are your thoughts?

Speaker B: 00:17:23

Well, just to say that we, I don't think we're saying that Test and Trace is wrong or the wrong decision. It's really, the point is that it's not, Test and Trace as it's set up is not measuring its own effectiveness. So, I think it's not, it's too early to tell and possibly we'll never know whether the 37 billion pounds was a good investment or not. It's been committed, it's been spent, but we don't know if it's worth the value, the return on investment, whether it was worth it or not. What we're saying is like, given you've got a big decision to make, how do you go about doing it most effectively? So, yeah, we're not, we're not, we're not, we're not, we're not having a poke at Test and Trace, despite all the other, we don't want to, we don't want to sully ourselves. We don't want to unload ourselves to the level.

Speaker C: 00:18:20

So, it's taken enough of a beating, hasn't it? Poor old Test and Trace. And I think most of the cost is, most of that cost is in fact in testing, which I don't think most people don't really object to. I mean, most people complain about the app not working or, you know, it being, all of the contracts being given to, you know, government cronies and not fairly let and all of that. That is what I want to think we should go on to, right, is what happened here really bypassed the normal processes in a lot of ways. Like normally when you're spending this amount of money, you would always be expected to put things out to tender, to run a proper competition. Now, those things do take months, right? So, that's, the problem is that probably wasn't an option.

Speaker A: 00:19:02

So, this is a situation where time was the issue, right? Or certainly one of the issues. Unlike, let's say the, you know, the example you gave there of the Titanic, right? Time really was a pressure here. So, they had the, you know, the decision makers had to act quickly. But Peter, you posed a question there or said, this is what we want to talk about, which is, well, how do you make a good decision? Even if we're not, and yeah, we're not saying that a bad decision was necessarily made with Test and Trace, but we're saying, so in a situation like that, how does one make a good decision? So, what's the answer?

Speaker B: 00:19:40

Well, the thing you don't do is you don't Google how to make a big decision fast because as Nick says, you get a lot of junk. So, the fact that, just for LOLs, just for LOLs, the top hit I got was from some company, I'm not going to name because I don't want to get sued by them, but 12 ways to make hard decisions easier. The first three are as follows. Follow your intuition. Great, yes. Number two is meditate and listen to your inner wisdom. Now, I think that's probably the same as number one. I wrote this article. Yeah. And then three is think about how your decision will make you feel after the fact. Yeah. And then number four is ask yourself two important questions, which is basically pros and cons for the decision. So, I would skip one, two, and three and just go to four. And then, you know, intuition is important. And then skip five through 12 because basically you should just do a cost-benefit analysis is the answer. Yeah. So, that's to illustrate the point that there's a lot of this, as you said, grey literature. There's all this sort of pop science. What's grey literature? What does that mean?

Speaker C: 00:20:53

Like business, you know, articles. Business blah, blah, blah. By companies, you know, write a white paper or something.

Speaker B: 00:21:00

Yeah. Unscientific kind of opinion-y stuff. Yeah. Anecdote driven. So, there's a lot of stuff out there that you just can't really use. It's very difficult to get to. I don't think it's possible to create a framework for decision-making that applies to everything.

Speaker C: 00:21:19

Yeah, a bit like it's my, I've got a framework for how to make a table, right? It's called gather, cut, build. First, you gather your word, then you cut it into the right shape, and then you build it. It's a bit like that. So, I think there's two things we need to distinguish between, which is the decision itself, like whether you should do it or not, whether you should do option A or option B. And then there's the implementation. And I think what we're saying is that, you know, the jury is out a bit on test and trace for the first criterion. Like, we're not quite sure whether or not it was a good idea. But even if it is a good idea, should the government have gone about it differently? And this is where we get onto this whole question about process. And if you look at what the moans are that business people have about decision-making, and everyone says it's too slow and the big organisations are bad at innovating and doing stuff quickly and all of that, it's because there's all these processes. Annoying red tape is the stuff that people moan about, right? But I mean, in defence of red tape, the reason that there is such a large amount of process, forget about a company. I mean, a company's got to worry about its shareholders, and they'll be held to account by the shareholders, and that's fair enough. Governments is worse than that, because it's our money. It really literally is money that they've taken from us and are supposed to be spending properly on our behalf. And all of those rules are there because in the past, because of past crap civil servants and corrupt politicians. And what's happened with the test and trace with all the contracts being let to Boris Johnson's mates and contractors being hired at £6,000 a day and all of that is what happens if you don't apply those processes. And so I feel like it's really a no win. I don't see that there's a way you can't both have decision making. You can't trust people to do to implement things properly, right, without all of this oversight and process. If you have to get an organisation to act fast, you can't have all of that oversight and process. So what you get is, you know, is cronyism and, you know, favouritism and corruption. You can't have you can't have neither. You know, I'm afraid.

Speaker A: 00:23:44

So to summarise then, we again, we have maybe about one in 20 episodes we need to do. We managed to do this. But in this episode, we have we have reached a conclusion to our question, right? Or which was, yeah. How do you make good decisions? How do you make fast, big decisions and do it well? Right. And the answer is don't make fast, big decisions. Unless you have to. Right. Yeah. Part A is don't make a big, important decision quickly, because it will go wrong. Two, sometimes you have to make a big decision fast.

Speaker C: 00:24:19

And that's it, right? That's it. Yeah, I do. But I think it is worth saying, just to reiterate something I said earlier, just about, you know, the thing is about cost benefit analyses. Well, actually, just in general, is they involve quite a lot of concepts that are not very intuitive. Right. So things like opportunity costs and probability and, you know, trying to de-bias yourself against failures of imagination by trying to do at least some kind of modicum of scenario generation. They're all things that are not time consuming. You know, these aren't going to delay a process compared to, for example, you know, contracting people, which is going to take days, even at its very quickest. You know, we're talking about is, does this look like it could be a good idea? Order of magnitude. What effect do we expect this to have? You know, and what does it depend on that we can't control and what are the probabilities of those things? They're not easy. Right. They're not things that you can expect some average, you know, input decision maker to necessarily understand. They're not easy, but they're not slow. Right. So, I mean, there are ways of doing this that are good and quite straightforward. So, yeah, I suppose what I'm saying is there's no excuse for not trying to make the right decision. Where I think there is an excuse is having to implement it in a slightly shoddy way. And I guess the argument would be, well, perhaps you have to take that into account a bit, you know, in the cost side of trying to set something like this up. To accept that you're going to be a victim of optimism bias and think that you can get it all done much quicker and better than you actually can.

Speaker A: 00:25:55

My old friend, optimism bias. Peter, so, gentlemen, we need to draw to a conclusion fairly soon. I've got a question I want to ask. But, Peter, anything you would like to add at this point?

Speaker B: 00:26:08

Just to sum up, if you have the luxury of time, then you're sort of, roughly speaking, your investment in the de-risking of a decision should be proportional to the overall cost of that decision. So, the rationalist approach would be that, you know, you want to make the amount of money you spend analysing, the amount of effort you spend analysing, proportional to the amount of potential impact you're going to have or the potential loss you're going to suffer. That just makes, you know, that's obvious, really.

Speaker A: 00:26:50

Yeah, yeah. Okay, let me know. So, I've got a question. I think I've asked this before in a podcast. Let's give it a go. So, I think in a previous podcast, I think I've asked what's the worst decision you've ever made or the best decision or something like that. I don't know. But I want to ask, what's the biggest, fastest decision that you've ever made? I don't know. How about that? Oh, yeah. Well, I can answer that.

Speaker C: 00:27:13

It's boring. I think it'll be the same as everyone else. Is it going to be kids? But I was conscious. No, it's not kids. No, that's quite straightforward. I think that was more on rails in a way. No, because you can't choose your kid, can you? You sort of think, well, we're going to have them. Not yet. We'll get what we get, you know. But you can make the decision to have a kid. No, it's house. The house. It's the house. You know, it's like the biggest decision, really, the biggest amount of money you're going to spend probably by an order of magnitude in your life. And, you know, when it comes to this house here, which I'm sitting in right now, we went in and looked around and I thought, this is quite nice. And then we went, I discovered that there were these stairs leading down to the basement and there was a whole room in the basement, the room I'm sitting in now. And the minute I saw it, I thought, that's it. We've got to have this house. And so we put the offer in. What, there and then? More or less. I mean, and then obviously, you know, we have those institutional breaks on craziness, like having a survey and all those kinds of things. But it does always struck me as weird that I'd probably spend more time worrying about what I'm going to cook for dinner than I worried about, you know, buying this house, which is, you know, weird when you think about it. But on the other hand, you know, what would have happened if I'd have spent ages mulling it over? We would have probably not ended up owning it. So there you are.

Speaker B: 00:28:33

When I bought my house, I didn't do that. I almost eliminated any kind of emotional reaction at all. I had an enormous spreadsheet with lots of different factors, all different, all weighted. Expect nothing less, Peter. And I scored each house I visited based on what data I could gather. And in fact, I used the same spreadsheet to decide which houses to go and see and which ones not to see based on information I could find about them from Rightmove and things. I'm struggling to think of any big decisions I've made. Yeah, but then you ended up in a semi in Bexley. Yeah, what's going on with that spreadsheet? The data is spitting out. Well, that was the optimal place at the time.

Speaker C: 00:29:16

Was one of your criteria must be at the end of the world's longest road?

Speaker B: 00:29:21

No, it was being conveniently close to shops was one of the things that put it there. You should have had an input for frequency of St George's flags. I should have had an input for amount that Nick Hare is going to moan about coming to visit.

Speaker C: 00:29:41

Well, no, the weird thing is, is that you're right that you are still only a 10 minute walk from the station. But it felt like an hour walk because that road was so long and straight. It's really strange. It was psychologically miles away from transport, even though it was, you know, it was back on the straight and narrow.

Speaker A: 00:30:00

That's all it was.

Speaker C: 00:30:01

What about you, Fraser?

Speaker A: 00:30:03

I don't know. I mean, I've made. Yeah. I mean, when you get to our sort of well, I'm older than you, but when you get to my sort of age and you making big decisions all the time. No, but there are some big life decisions.

Speaker C: 00:30:17

The titan of industry like yourself.

Speaker A: 00:30:19

Exactly. I know. All I can say is this, is that I do. I just do one of two things when there's a decision to me to be made, especially a big one, which is either just procrastinate. We'll throw a dice. Either procrastinate for just, you know, months, years or just take an insanely quick decision. Yeah, we'll do that. Probably more the latter.

Speaker B: 00:30:48

Doesn't one necessarily lead to the other? You procrastinate for ages to the point where you have to make the decision because it's imminent. Then you have to make the snap decision. Isn't that sort of the same thing?

Speaker C: 00:30:59

Doesn't one necessarily lead to the other? I feel like they're the opposite. I think what Fraser's saying is he either makes his mind up instantly or doesn't make his mind up for ages. Yeah, right. That's, yeah, I think that's it. So you are thinking about it while you're procrastinating. That's what you're saying. I think so. I don't know. I like this. The thing is, I like that approach because I think when you're procrastinating, it's probably because you think it's often I find that that's when you know what the answer is, but you don't like it. It's like when you when you sort of think, OK, well, I know what the right thing to do here is, but I don't want to have to do it. And I think I think probably so in a way, I would guess that probably the things where it lines up and you think I want to do this thing and it seems like a good idea, that's the instant Fraser intuition says yes. But if but if it's not like that on a procrastination decision, do you often end up do you usually end up not doing the thing that you're thinking about doing?

Speaker A: 00:31:56

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Speaker C: 00:31:57

So it's sort of your way of coming to terms with the fact that, you know, the answer's no deep down.

Speaker A: 00:32:02

Yeah, possibly. I don't know. I'm quite enjoying this therapy session. And what I would say is I have made what others would call rash decisions. Now, to what extent they were quick or not, I don't know. For example, I have quit any number of jobs. Right. And quit them when I've had all sorts of responsibilities. You know, not long after I met you, Nick, I moved to Honduras with a baby and became a dive master. A lot of people and I was in quite an OK place in my career, but I just couldn't be. I just couldn't bear looking at walls anymore. Computers. Yeah. Was that a good decision or not? I don't know. That sort of led that definitely led to me becoming a photographer, filmmaker that just as a byproduct.

Speaker C: 00:32:52

I don't think. Well, it's another podcast. But I think people overestimate the personal costs of doing things like people are much more resilient than they think they are. And so, you know, even if things go wrong, people are usually fine. And that actually is my general attitude to life. And this optimism bias I talked about, I always think I'll be fine. I'll be fine. Well, I don't think that's optimism. That's just true. Like people, people, the things that people dread happening, they cope with fine.

Speaker A: 00:33:19

And actually, and again, just delving further into this therapy session, my father died when I was quite young, which is obviously quite a big thing to happen in someone's life. And I think a lesson that I personally took from that was, well, what's the worst that can happen here? No one's died. You know, no one will die. And so as a result of that, you know, I've sort of often I know that's my sort of take on it. I think that's a good takeaway for everyone, for the listeners there. There we go. Just do it. Just do it. Yeah, I'm going to add that as my point number 13. For legal reasons, we should probably point out that you should not just do it. Do a cost benefit analysis first. Yeah, no, I'm going to cross that out on the article that I was going to put on the internet. Okay. Let's stop there. As always, thanks for listening. If you have any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast.alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. Also, if you've enjoyed the podcast, what should people do, Nick? I think they should give a cheeky wink to that like button. Yeah, they should. They should just do it. They should just like it. And follow us on your chosen streaming service. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGrew. We've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.