This seems heavily related to the main point of the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" . There are two major types of thinking-instantaneous, "go with your gut" judgments, and conscious processing. Spending even a minute on a decision forces you to use some conscious processing in addition to the go-with-your-gut decision.
This is especially useful when you're solving new problems or working on things you're not particularly good at. My personal example is estimating distance. When somebody asked, my "gut feeling" about the distance from Boston to Delaware was 600 miles. 30 seconds of conscious thinking and I realized it could be no more than 400 miles (the correct answer is about 350).
The other useful aspect of switching to conscious thinking is that it at least makes you aware of the rationale for your decision. When making a conscious estimate I break it down into smaller parts, and if the estimate is way off it's usually because one of the parts was off. But for me, that doesn't work with instant guesses.
The spread of the LessWrong meme is really positive. A lot of bloggers seem to be linking or alluding to stuff from there these days. And it's leading to increased awareness that rationality is not always easy, nor something to be taken for granted.
I don't think necessarily everone has to study the stuff in depth, as long as the "you is crazy/stupid, foolish human" message gets across. The future belongs to the wise aka those who fail to accept and put up with their own bullshit :)
I liked the article. Here's my humble summary of the main 2 points
1. Don't always make decisions in 0 minutes (instantly). Instead, think about them for 1 minute. The time difference is small but the results may not be.
2. Don't always default to the easiest solution.
Point 2 reminds me a lot of a really great presentation I watched recently by Rich Hickey (the creator of the Clojure programming language) which highlighted that easy solutions are not always the simplest solutions; however it is the latter that we should strive for and not the former. The presentation is really good and contains some insightful thoughts about design and decision making - www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
> If you're the kind of person who prefers to sit back and think about stuff, entrepreneurship will be quite a challenge. The default in the world of... humans... is that nothing happens.
Some months ago I was thinking exactly about this issue (for more than one minute!) and I started working on an idea to overcome it. Sort of meta, I know :)
[On topic shameless plug] Result: I'm building asaclock (http://www.asaclock.com), an anti-procrastination web community for startup single founders and people working on side projects.
"A programmer will fix every problem with more code."
And that's why the best programmers are lazy. Would rather spend twenty minutes thinking about a good solution, than ten minutes implementing a contrived solution.
Maybe entrepreneurs should be a bit lazier as well? Or maybe they should just delegate all the big decisions to their daily 30 minute run?
Really, if people aren't dying this very instance, I see no problem with making a decision the next morning.
