Choices

by Ernie Miller

In the video titled "Choices" presented by Ernie Miller at the Keep Ruby Weird 2015 event, the main theme revolves around the concept of decision-making and its implications in personal and professional life. Miller emphasizes that choices are an inherent part of every individual’s agency, affecting not only their own lives but also the world around them. The talk is structured around a few key points that highlight the complexities of making choices, the consequences that stem from them, and how our perceptions can skew our decision-making processes.

Key Points Discussed:
- Encouragement to Speak: Miller begins by acknowledging the support from his company, Visium, which motivated him to give this talk.
- Understanding Choices: He describes life as a series of decisions we must make, sometimes trivial and other times weighty, as illustrated by a simple anecdote about choosing cookies.
- Personal Experience with Cancer: He shares his experience with testicular cancer, demonstrating how this life challenge forced him to confront choices that felt imposed rather than voluntary.
- Choose Your Own Adventure Talks: Inspired by childhood books, Miller discusses his concept for an interactive talk where audience choices affect the direction of the presentation, reflecting the unpredictability and excitement of decision-making.
- Consequences of Choices: He elaborates on how each choice has repercussions, using an example involving potential and kinetic energy to explain that without consequences, choices are meaningless.
- Cognitive Biases: Miller introduces ideas such as the Dunning-Kruger effect and narrative fallacy, explaining how our brains can mislead us into making poor decisions or misinterpreting events.
- Survivorship Bias: Utilizing World War II statistics, he explains how focusing on surviving instances can lead to faulty decision-making patterns, showing the importance of understanding failures as a learning opportunity.
- Agency vs. Victim Mentality: He contrasts having agency—an inherent power to influence your environment—with adopting a victim mentality, suggesting that while some experiences may render individuals powerless, they can still control their reactions and choices.
- Reflections on Past Choices: Through personal anecdotes, including his obsession with achieving high ranks in World of Warcraft, Miller illustrates how distractions can mask unresolved issues and lead to unforeseen choices.
- Conscious Decision-Making: He concludes with an emphasis on the importance of being intentional with choices, advocating for mindfulness in decision-making processes.

Miller's talk serves as a reminder that while choices can feel overwhelming, embracing our role as agents of change can empower individuals to navigate their paths with intention and awareness.

00:00:11.240 Good afternoon, everybody! I hope you enjoyed your beer and candy. Before I get too far into things, I want to thank my company, Visium.

00:00:14.679 Frankly, until they encouraged me to do this talk, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to pull it off. They really convinced me I could, so I probably wouldn't be here today if they hadn't encouraged me.

00:00:26.400 So if you care about secure applications, you should talk to me later. I've been thinking a lot about choices lately. There are times in our lives when we encounter a fork in the path where we stop to take stock of where we are, decide where we want to be, and pick a direction that we think will help us get there.

00:00:45.039 Now, sometimes the choice is really easy because it seems trivial or obvious. For instance, I have a standing policy that the answer to 'Would you like to have a cookie?' is always yes. But sometimes, the choice is trickier. The choice is obviously important, but we may not feel as though it is really ours to make.

00:01:05.799 Just last week, I went in for a regular cancer screening that I’ve been doing for the past two years. For those who don’t already know from Twitter, I had testicular cancer, and I suppose I could choose not to do these screenings, but it doesn’t really feel like a real choice.

00:01:30.320 That being said, don’t feel bad for me; I had a lot of fun with my cancer. First off, testicular cancer is highly survivable, and secondly, you get to make all kinds of horrible jokes that nobody can say anything about. It's like, 'Hey, I have cancer!' My wife is a saint for putting up with me during that time.

00:01:51.000 And for at least the first few days, the puns were 'nuts'; they really were! After that, they were just nutty. So, a few months ago, Terrence tweeted at me, and I had a choice to make.

00:02:07.520 There’s some backstory here. Months before, at RailsConf, I talked to Terrence and Davey about an idea I had for a talk. Terrence knew what I would present on if I submitted, but the problem was that it was going to be a lot more work than any talk I'd ever given, and I wouldn't have much time to prepare due to other obligations.

00:02:35.480 However, Terrence is a good salesperson; he convinced me that since I could back out at any time, I should just go ahead and submit. He's sneaky like that. So what was the idea? When I was a kid, I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books.

00:02:59.920 The thing I loved the most about them was that I not only didn’t know how the ending would turn out, but I also had a say in how we got there. For an eight-year-old, this was a huge sense of control, so the idea I had was for a Choose Your Own Adventure talk.

00:03:21.080 Now, I’ve never seen anyone try giving a talk like this. Of course, that could very likely be because it’s a horrible idea. But I decided that if there’s any place I could get away with trying something a little risky and out there, it’s a Keep Ruby Weird conference!

00:03:34.519 So what I’d like you to do now—keeping in mind that the Wi-Fi may not play nicely—is use your phone. This is how it’s going to work: go to choices.ernie in a browser, whether it’s on your phone or current versions of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, iOS, Android, even Windows Phone and Internet Explorer.

00:03:43.759 Those should all work. The nice thing about writing an app used by developers is that you don’t have to support IE8—thank goodness! Oh, we have 354 people connected; this is great! Now, let’s see if we can make this work.

00:04:06.000 Pick an animal! We have in contention: cats, dogs, squirrel monkeys, and Venezuelan Poodle Moths. Let’s give you a moment to vote. Wow, Poodle Moth is getting no love at all. Alright, it looks like dogs are going to win, so we’re going to go with dogs.

00:04:21.760 You get a big picture of a dog, and you get one extra bonus picture of a dog for making that choice! So remember these things. When I was a kid, these things loomed in front of me like genies in so many lamps, right? If I had a quarter, or if I could bum a quarter from my parents, I would stand in front of these machines and agonize over which choking hazard I was going to purchase.

00:04:52.639 The sticky hands were a constant favorite of mine; I think they’re one of the all-time best vending machine toys. You’ve seen these things before, right? A gel wrist rest. A long time ago, I had one that looked pretty much exactly like this, and it had started to fall apart.

00:05:06.360 When I pulled off the cover, I made the most amazing discovery. It turns out that these things are basically made from the same material as sticky hands. It’s super stretchy, and while they don't make them like they used to, we used to have fun flinging this thing at people or the wall, and it would walk down.

00:05:21.440 We could pick things up with it. Anyway, one day, we decided to see just how far we could stretch our sticky hand. I grabbed one end, and my friend Jeff grabbed the other, and we started walking. Now, I’m about to drop some science on you.

00:05:40.640 In physics, there are two kinds of energy: potential energy and kinetic energy. Potential energy is the kind of energy you build up whenever you pull back on a slingshot or stretch something elastically. Kinetic energy, on the other hand, is energy in motion.

00:05:47.840 When you release the gel wrist rest or the slingshot, things become exciting! At about this time, Jeff decided to let go of his end of Rodri. I remind you of where I was holding my end of Rodri when that happened—potential energy quickly became kinetic energy, aided by gravity doing what gravity does. You might imagine what happened next.

00:06:11.240 On the bright side, I now have half the surface area for that particular attack vector. My point is that choices have consequences; otherwise, what’s the point? If we’re going to make choices that have no consequences, then why make them at all? It’s almost as inescapable as gravity.

00:06:20.720 If our choices have consequences, it makes sense that we would want to have some control over them and optimize them. So what will we use to try to do that? Oh, it’s neck and neck here!

00:06:40.639 Alright, so it looks like instincts have the lead. Wait, brains just took the lead! The funny thing is that our brains are huge liars. There's a cognitive psychologist named Peter Wayon who conducted a well-known experiment where he presented people with a sequence of numbers, like '24'. He told everybody that this sequence followed some sort of rule.

00:07:52.720 Participants were allowed to guess as many sequences of numbers as they would like and to ask whether or not they conformed to the rule. They then had to try to infer the rule that Wayon was using. Because we don’t have time for everyone to guess, I’ll ask you to pick a sequence that doesn’t follow the rule.

00:08:18.720 So the thing I just asked you to do is called indirect testing of a hypothesis, and it's often something we don’t do. I prompted you to do it just now, and that makes things a little easier. Normally, we form a hypothesis and think of the results we’d expect them to yield. That’s precisely what happened in Wason’s study.

00:08:41.760 Participants would find a sequence that satisfied the rule they had in mind. For instance, many would say even numbers or numbers incrementing by two, and they would continue to test the same hypothesis with every sequence they supplied.

00:09:02.720 Even when they were told that that was not the rule? They’d say things like Pi, Pi plus 2, Pi plus 4. For the record, the answer was 642, and the rule was just increasing numbers—it was much simpler than anybody thought. Another thing our brains tend to do is functions somewhat incompletely.

00:09:27.520 You’re probably familiar with the phrase 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'. Psychologists refer to this as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Put simply, it means those who know the least think they know the most, because they don’t know what they don’t know.

00:09:44.720 It’s also interesting that we can’t see our own blind spots, which is why they are blind spots. Side note—by the way, I love the title of an article that Dunning wrote: 'We’re all Confident Idiots'. It’s a fantastic name for an article.”

00:10:01.280 Our brains love a good story, and in fact, we love them so much that our brains are constantly making up stories that we tell ourselves. We call this the narrative fallacy, where we assign importance to events, even when there's no sense to them at all. We weave a narrative that makes sense. Just because a story is convincing doesn’t make it true.

00:10:21.440 Another interesting example is from World War II, when a branch of the government called the Applied Mathematics Panel conducted what we now refer to as War Math. The military called in a statistical research group to help with a serious problem: you had about a 50-50 chance of making it back alive if you were flying a bomber.

00:10:43.080 While the military knew that it needed to add more armor to the bombers, they couldn’t cover the whole bomber with armor because if they did, the airplane wouldn’t get off the ground. They wanted to keep them in the air.

00:11:03.840 They had records of where the planes that had returned from enemy territory had taken damage. Over and over again, they saw bullet holes accumulating along the wings and around the tail gunner and down the center of the body. So they asked the statistical research group for help in deciding where to put the armor.

00:11:23.080 Here’s where the idea of survivorship bias comes in. They looked at the planes that returned and decided the most bullet holes were in these places. This is where they needed the armor, but they neglected to realize that these planes made it back. The ones they needed to worry about were the ones that didn’t make it back, which probably had holes in other places.

00:11:44.720 Thus, the holes showed where the bombers could be shot and still survive the flight home. As a result, the armor needed to be placed elsewhere. We’re not any better; we have heroes, and we look to rare success stories.

00:12:06.480 We strive to emulate their success, but all the while, we miss opportunities to learn from failures—both theirs and our own. Even if we ask our heroes to share their failures candidly, their honest answers would be tainted by the same narrative fallacy we discussed earlier. They, like us, are just as likely to overemphasize the reasons for their results.

00:12:27.560 And to downplay the roles of things outside of their control. This is just a selection of some ways our brains can’t be trusted. So when we put it that way, it sounds pretty hopeless, right?

00:12:50.480 All kinds of factors conspire to influence our choices and outcomes. Let’s just go with internal factors. Clearly, we can’t trust ourselves to always make the best choices. In my younger years, I went on a few hayrides.

00:13:10.720 You’re familiar with these? People think it’s a great idea to load a bunch of people in the back of a trailer filled with hay. As someone who has suffered with allergies for a long time, it’s perplexing to me why anyone thinks this is a good idea. But I went on a few.

00:13:35.640 On the bright side, there’s always a bonfire where you can have hot chocolate, marshmallows, and hot dogs. So the hayride's over, and I’m standing off to one side minding my own business when two very attractive young ladies came to chat with me.

00:13:59.680 This confused me because I was nowhere near as handsome as the two young men in the stock photo here. So naturally, I panicked and started thinking, 'What would a cool person do?' This was literally what went through my mind, and the only thing I could think of that I’d seen cool people do was lean against the wall and prop my leg out like this.

00:14:20.960 I thought I looked chill. There was a problem with this plan, though. Behind me, directly on the spot where I decided to prop my leg, was a basement window, which sent shards of glass showering down into the basement kitchen where two elderly ladies were making hot chocolate for us.

00:14:46.760 Needless to say, that didn’t go very well! I want to talk about something different relating to internal factors. I have regularly assumed that the stuff that’s obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

00:15:02.640 For a long time, this kept me from sharing code, and it kept me from doing anything regarding speaking engagements. For at least two years, I filled out those yearly review worksheets, the ones where they ask what your goals for the next year are.

00:15:19.840 Later, they review and see if you hit them. I had regularly put public speaking down as one of my goals, but I hadn’t really taken any steps to actually pursue it. On January 1st, 2013, I made a resolution and posted it on my site to keep myself accountable.

00:15:34.240 I picked the entire internet as my accountability group because I suck at boundaries! A few weeks later, I had two conference speaking opportunities booked. This was just weeks after I made that announcement.

00:16:04.440 My first-ever speaking opportunity was at a Ruby conference in Texas, and I’ll be forever grateful to the organizers for giving me that shot. But that same year, I got to go to Moscow and speak, and I got to keynote RubyCon, which I had privately set as a five-year goal.

00:16:26.519 I hadn’t told anybody about that goal. Then, just a couple of months ago, I got to go to beautiful Barcelona and speak. More importantly than any of these, I made so many friends over these past few years, and I’m so thankful for everybody in this room that I can count as a friend.

00:16:58.800 All of this was simply because I chose to shut down that little voice in my head worrying about what other people might think. I don’t claim to be the smartest person in the room, but it turned out that the hayride and the speaking things actually had a few things in common after all—they weren’t completely different.

00:17:12.480 I didn’t recognize this until much later, but nearly every time I opted to be inauthentic because of what someone else might think, I missed out somehow. I want to make it very clear that this is not a prescription for what you should do.

00:17:35.600 What I’m saying is that the patterns you see in your life are going to be different. But I promise you that if you spend some time figuring out these kinds of patterns, it will be worthwhile. So, which one are we?

00:18:07.440 We’re agents. Now when we say we're agents, we don’t mean we’re like superheroes, although that would be awesome. What I mean is agency. We’re talking about the power you have to shape the world around you, sometimes in large ways and sometimes in small. An agent is something you are.

00:18:39.840 With that said, I would like to point out that you're an agent, and your choices shape the world around you. The interesting thing is that we exert our agency whether we want to or not; it just happens. Sometimes it’s involuntary, but we’re still shaping the world.

00:19:03.680 If we contrast that with being a victim, I want to be very clear about what I mean. We’re not talking about people who have actually been victimized; there are people who have actually been victimized, and this is not what we mean. We’re talking about victim mentality.

00:19:24.480 Victim mentality is a really important takeaway: while being an agent is something that you are, victim mentality is something you learn. I’d like to think that if it’s learned, it can be unlearned. There are situations where you might really be victimized, but you can choose not to let the victim mentality take control.

00:19:51.000 I’ve been volunteering as a counselor for about seven years now, and I’ve dealt with folks in desperate situations that I wouldn’t wish on anybody, along with those pretty far in the other direction on the spectrum.

00:20:06.720 In my experience, there’s very little correlation between people who are victims and those who exhibit victim mentality. I’ve gotten pretty good at guessing when this is going to become an issue. People who feel powerless usually resort to passive aggression because they have difficulty acknowledging their anger directly.

00:20:27.440 People who exhibit victim mentality often feel powerless. But I’d like to think that even in situations where we genuinely can’t control what happens, we should look for things that we can control—even when you can’t control the outcome.

00:20:48.240 You can control how you react to it. This might sound trite, but it’s something I have to constantly remind myself of. This might be the only control we have in some situations. The point I’m trying to make is that you’re an agent, and agents choose.

00:21:07.520 I’m going to guess that at least a few of you recognize these two images: they’re the symbols of the Alliance and Horde factions in Blizzard’s MMO, World of Warcraft. Years ago, I played World of Warcraft—a lot.

00:21:32.080 This is a screenshot of a friend and me posing with King Magni Bronzebeard, the Dwarven King. We were the only two Dwarven Grand Marshals on the Argent Dawn server.

00:21:53.120 There was a point to this, I swear, and we’ll come back to it later. If we’re agents, we’re literally always making choices—consciously or unconsciously. As Rush told us, even if we choose not to decide, we still have made a choice.

00:22:05.680 So hang on; I have something I need to do. Alright, let’s see how this goes. This is actually working! I thought this would crash.

00:22:15.920 The problem is that we make so many choices without realizing it. In my World of Warcraft story, Grand Marshal was a rank you had to attain by playing a lot of PvP (player versus player) activity.

00:22:43.520 To get the highest ranks grinding for Grand Marshal, you needed to put in at least 8 hours a day. I had a regular day job, but I still put in my hours for Grand Marshal, operating on about three hours of sleep.

00:23:05.440 I became very invested in my Grand Marshal pursuit, putting in hours on each front. I was trying to juggle family life, trying to feed myself, and all the things that matter. Yet I was getting no sleep!

00:23:28.320 When I started a new job, I almost fell asleep in front of my brand-new boss after putting in those hours the night before. I was one day away from getting my Grand Marshal ship.

00:23:54.680 Likewise, in this particular story, I wasn’t aware that a choice was being made in emphasizing those accomplishments because at the time, I felt like nothing else in my life was going right. I was dealing with a failing marriage, a dead-end job, and feeling borderline depressed.

00:24:05.760 Putting in my time in World of Warcraft made me feel like I had some control somehow. I hadn’t reflected on it at the time; I didn’t understand what was going on, but that’s what I needed.

00:24:20.880 So, you know, likewise, we work all day, we run out of time, and sometimes we think we’ve underestimated how much time we had, but we didn’t; we chose to be distracted.

00:24:33.760 We know what we did; we woke up, checked online, went on social media, and got distracted instead of focusing. At the end of the day, we realize we were distracted and think it just happened; but we chose that option.

00:24:55.360 Look, it’s good to make good choices, but it’s even better to understand why you make them. It’s even better to recognize the choices you didn’t even realize you made. Even good choices might not be the best ones.

00:25:10.400 Let’s say, hypothetically, you have writer's block for a talk you're working on, and you want to take the time to build a fully functional chat application just for one slide. Alright, does anyone have anything they’d like to say before I wrap this up?

00:25:35.760 This is going away! Oh, the helicopter will stand by us forever. So, this by the way is Yak Bieber. I found him online yesterday. This is about intentionality; we have to choose our choices.

00:25:51.039 It sounds very meta, but be conscious of the choices you're making. I had no idea how this was going to turn out when I told Terrence yes; just three days ago, I was building this very slide and stressing out over the right content to include.

00:26:06.639 I didn’t know how it was going to turn out when I got up here in front of you. There are a lot of slides in this talk you never saw, because of the choices we made along the way. Did we choose wisely? The real adventure is in not knowing how the story ends, isn’t it?

00:26:26.960 Thank you!