Happy Friday everybody! You're listening to another Friday refill episode of Developer Tea. Most of the time when we are trying to determine whether something is high quality, whether it's acceptable in our minds, whether we want to sign off on it, maybe it's a PR, we're trying to approve, or maybe we want to hire somebody. All of these scenarios require us to have some kind of standard, and the easiest standard is comparison. Virtually everything we do in our lives triggers some kind of comparison, and that comparison is most often a construct. Before we get to deep town this road, let's take a step back and and walk through how that works. You might be thinking, well, no this isn't something I'm making up, I'm comparing two candidates, comparing candidate A to candidate B. But the truth is you're not actually comparing the real and actual person. You're comparing your conception of that person, and maybe more accurately, you're trying to forecast both of these people into the future, and compare their theoretical performances. Person A performs theoretically to some specific standard, some quality level, and person B performs to their quality level. And all of this kind of orchestra that you have in your mind provides you the necessary grounds for making a decision, or at least that's the way that we think. We imagine that we can forecast, or that we can compare adequately, we can compare accurately, and ultimately make decisions. Another way that this comparison imagination occurs is most often within ourselves. We compare a decision that we made in the past to a decision that we could have made in the past. In the same manner, we're kind of back forecasting, we're rewinding in time and trying to imagine what things would have been like, had we made a different decision? And very often, we take these things to the extremes. So, for example, we might imagine that we made the right decision, and that any other decision would have gone wrong. Very rarely, if we feel that we've made the right decision, do we imagine that there is an even better decision we could have made? Similarly, if we feel that we have made the wrong decision, it seems that any other decision could have been better, and that no other decision could have been worse. Imaginary comparisons are a tricky thing because we manipulate them. We manipulate our version of reality in that imaginary comparison, and they ultimately are a pretty shifty thing to rely on. If we were to ask someone else to cast their imaginary comparison and have them totally separated from ours, it would very likely come up with two completely different comparisons. The truth is, it's difficult to get away from comparisons altogether, and probably not a good idea either. We need some kind of benchmark to make decisions. It's very difficult to make decisions without comparing. It takes a lot more energy to make decisions on some kind of principle basis every time. So comparison is a useful tool, but we can kind of adjust for some of those biases and distortions that we introduce by forcing ourselves to assign various probabilities. This is something that Annie Duke talks about in her book How to Decide. You can essentially look at the multitude of possible outcomes, given, let's say you have a decision to make between A, B, or C, and you can run through outcomes, if you choose A, outcomes if you choose B, and outcomes if you choose C, and assign probabilities to those outcomes. This is pretty time-consuming, and it's not the only strategy that I want to recommend on this show, but instead I want you to be more aware of this behavior, of this unintentional imaginary comparison, and recognize when it's happening, and consider is this something that could hurt my decision-making process? What can I do to step outside of my imaginary comparisons and try to return to something that is more concrete? Or can I gather multiple people's input on this so that things that I'm missing might be balanced out? Finally, a simple heuristic that we've talked about on the show before, often when you believe that there is two polls, if there was a bad decision and a good decision, or if there's a bad candidate and a good candidate, it's likely that you need a third and not a decoy, but a true third option to consider. And the reason for this is because instead of polarizing and creating these kind of magnetic places to attach all of your negative comments and places to attach all of your positive comments, now you have a little bit more of a complicated option in the mix. And the reason this is important is because it kind of reactivates that thinking process in your brain. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope this was a challenging and a motivating discussion on the idea of imaginary comparisons. Remember we're doing this all the time. Don't judge yourself too harshly for doing this, but instead, become more aware. Thanks so much for listening to this episode and until next week, enjoy your tea.