Decision Making - Ruth Chang

Here's a talk that could literally change your life. Which career should I pursue? Should I break up - or get married?! Where should I live? Big decisions li...

‘Drifters allow the world to write the story of their lives. They let mechanisms of reward and punishment—pats on the head, fear, the easiness of an option—to determine what they do.’

‘I can tell you that fear of the unknown, while a common motivational default in dealing with hard choices, rests on a misconception of them. It’s a mistake to think that in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other…’

‘We unwittingly assume that values like justice, beauty, kindness, are akin to scientific quantities, like length, mass and weight.’

‘As post-Enlightenment creatures, we tend to assume that scientific thinking holds the key to everything of importance in our world, but the world of value is different from the world of science. The stuff of the one world can be quantified by real numbers. The stuff of the other world can’t.’

— Ruth Chang

In this video, Ruth Chang offers philosophical insight to assist with the decision-making challenges we face as we navigate through life.