So I’m sitting here at work thinking “how late do we have to be here until we order Chinese into the office?” I say thinking, I’ve just said it out loud, then after that we had a conversation about it.
Anyway, the problem is this. We don’t know how long this problem is going to take, it could be solved in the next 30 minutes, it could be we’re here until 10pm. If we solve it at 6pm then it will have been pointless ordering Chinese because we can just go home and have dinner. But if we don’t order it and we’re stuck here till 10pm then we’ll be really hungry. But at what point do you say, right, this is the point I’m going to order Chinese food even though I still don’t know how much longer I will be there.
This problem occurs regularly with pub trips. You wonder if people are going to be there for a while because you don’t want to get there as they are leaving but the longer you leave it the more likely that is of happening. And at the end of the night, when you haven’t gone you say to yourself “if I had gone at the start I would have been there drinking for ages – but now it’s too late because they will be leaving soon.” Indeed this could well be applied to almost any point in the night.
The thing is, I’m sure this is some kind of grand philosophical problem that I am just applying to pub and takeaway activities. Anyone know what it is?
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Tags: decisions, philosophy, problems
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 10:28 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.