I am reading Richard Lui’s interesting new book, Enough About Me: the unexpected power of selflessness. Chapter 14 is titled Ten Stones, and he begins with an example about deciding which of three vehicles to buy. (My image shows chickpeas rather than stones).
One way of doing this would be to rank each choice on a scale from 1 to 10, where ten is perfect. When we rank our choices that way there are a large number of possible combinations, including ties (and even three-way ties). We’d like to choose the optimum, ‘perfect’ vehicle. But we don’t really have enough money to buy perfection.
Instead, our choice is between a brand-new bottom-of-the-line subcompact (without air conditioning!), a used luxury car (2005 model, with 120,000 miles), and our aunt’s eight-year-old minivan. Richard suggests that instead of the 1 to 10 ranking for each choice we begin with a total of ten stones, and then divide them up among those three choices. That radically reduces the number of possible combinations. He decided the used luxury car was a 5, the new bottom-of-the-line subcompact was a 3, and our aunt’s eight-year-old minivan was a 2.
As shown above, I tried to list all the possible combinations using ten stones for 2, 3, 4, or 5 choices. There seem to be just 5 for 2 choices (with one tie), just 8 for 3 choices (with one tie), just 8 for 4 choices (with two ties), and just 5 for 5 choices (with one tie).
What happens when we add another stone for a total of an odd 11 (to eliminate some ties)? As shown above, there now seem to be just 5 for 2 choices (no ties), just 8 for 3 choices (no ties), just 10 for 4 choices (with two ties), and just 7 for 5 choices (with one tie). We got rid of the ties for 2 or 3 choices by adding one more stone.
A Google search of the phrase ‘ten stones’ led me to an article by Mark Newton on October 30, 2017 titled Facing an overwhelming decision? Get stoned.
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