https://www.npr.org/2017/08/21/54509...can-get-better
https://www.npr.org/templates/transc...=1564352245696

Among the many things Gilbert studies is how people make predictions about future events — specifically, how we make predictions about how we'll feel about future events. One of the most important questions we ask when making any decision is "how will this make me feel?" But no matter how much time we spend thinking about the future, we don't get any better at predicting it. That's why, as Gilbert writes in his book Stumbling on Happiness, divorce lawyers and people who remove tattoos continue to have a steady stream of customers.

"Almost any decision you're debating, large or small, many people have already made it, and they've made it in both directions. There are people who are doing the things you're only imagining [And] it turns out that if you can simply measure their happiness, you can get a pretty good guide about how happy you will be in the future"

[...]

"[E]verybody wants the first kind of information. The women in our study all think they're going to make a much better prediction of how much they'll enjoy the date if they can just learn about the guy. But what we find is that they're much more accurate in predicting their own experience if they know nothing except another woman's experience. This woman is, in a sense, a surrogate for their future selves. And we call this method surrogation - using other people's experience as a guide to your own."

[...]

Q: "[F]emale professors, for example, get much worse reviews than male professors when they're just as good. I mean, isn't there a risk in essentially outsourcing your judgment to the crowd when the crowd, actually, is capable, fully, of having, you know, collective biases?"

A: "First, if you share the biases of the reviewers, they will correctly predict how you will feel, even if it's unfair.

[...]

"But what's interesting is we tracked the happiness of the people who had made these decisions over the course of several weeks.

And what we found is that people who made an irrevocable decision - one they couldn't change - were much happier with the choice they made. When you've made an irrevocable decision, you rationalize it. Once something's gone and gone forever, the mind gets to work figuring out why what it got is really better than what it lost.

But when a decision isn't irrevocable, when you can remake it, and revisit it and change your mind any time, what do you do? You just ruminate about it, right? You buy a sweater, and you know you can take it back any time. And every time you put it on, you look in the mirror and you think, oh, I don't know. Maybe it's not a good fit. Maybe it's not a good color. Maybe I ought to bring it back. On the other hand, if this sweater was bought at a place that won't take it back, you look in the mirror and you say, gosh, that looks good."

[...]

"What they're ignoring is a huge database of information from people who actually sat through the class for 15 weeks and have a whole lot to say about whether you'll enjoy it or not. You can't convince a student to take a class that has great reviews if they didn't like the 10 minutes of the first lecture.

The problem is something we call the illusion of diversity. We think we are utterly unique, that other people's experiences might tell us a little bit about ours, but not very much, because after all, we're so different than everybody. Well, nonsense. You're not different than everybody. We're basically all the same."