Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options
- Duncan Sabien
- 1 hour ago
- 12 min read
Short of time? Read the key takeaways.
🧠 Fabricated options feel real but aren't. Plenty of things that seem imaginable are actually inconsistent or impossible. This even applies to decision making contexts. You might imagine your options are A and B, without noticing that careful examination reveals that one of those options is inconsistent or impossible. It's a fabricated option.
⚠️ Fabricated options disguise uncomfortable tradeoffs. When we face difficult choices, we might be motivated to invent easy options that avoid painful costs. In reality, those costs exist regardless of whether we acknowledge them or not and, often, aiming for the nonexistent easy option means missing your chance at the best of the realistic ones.
👨👩👧 Examples are everywhere. This article explores several examples, from parents who want to believe that they can make their child act in a certain way (without incurring any cost to their relationship with that child), to a romantic partner who wants to believe they can stop the person they love from 'drowning'. The longer version of this article (available here), contains additional examples.
🔍 Naming fabricated options helps you catch them. Recognizing option fabrication as a distinct psychological pattern helps you to pause and ask: "Is this option genuinely possible, or am I flinching away from a harder but more honest choice?" The article concludes with some resources that might help.
This is an essay about one of those “once you see it, you will see it everywhere” phenomena. It is a common, destructive psychological and interpersonal dynamic and, at least in my own personal experience, it's been quite valuable to have it named–so that I can quickly recognize the commonality between what I had previously thought of as completely unrelated situations.
The original quote referenced in the title is “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Background 1: Gyroscopes
Gyroscopes are weird.
At least, the way they appear to float and move makes them seem that way. Except they're not actually weird. They're quite normal and mundane and straightforward. The weirdness of gyroscopes is what is sometimes called 'a map-territory confusion'.
Map-territory confusion There are lots of ways we represent the world. We do it with language, scientific theories, our personal mental models, and more. A map-territory confusion occurs when someone reasons about a representation (the map) as if it’s reality (the territory), forgetting that the representation doesn’t capture some important details.
Gyroscopes seem weird because my map (my mental model of the world) is poorly made, and predicts that they will do something other than their normal, mundane, straightforward thing. In reality, the weirdness is actually in my expectations of how they will behave, not their behavior.
In large part, this is because I don't have the consequences of physical law engraved deeply enough into my soul that they make intuitive sense.
I can imagine a world that looks exactly like the world around me, in every way, except that in this imagined world, gyroscopes don't have any of their strange black-magic properties. It feels coherent to me. It feels like a world that could possibly exist.
“Everything's the same, except gyroscopes do nothing special.” Sure, why not.
But in fact, such a world is deeply, deeply incoherent. It is Not Possible with capital letters. And a physicist with sufficiently sharp intuitions would know this—would be able to see the implications of a world where gyroscopes “don't do anything weird,” and tell me all of the ways in which reality falls apart.
The seeming coherence of the imaginary world where gyroscopes don't balance and don't precess and don't resist certain kinds of motion is a product of my own ignorance, and of the looseness with which I am tracking how different facts fit together, and what the consequences of those facts are. It's like a toddler thinking that they can eat their slice of cake, and still have that very same slice of cake available to eat again the next morning.
Background 2: H2O and XYZ
In the book Labyrinths of Reason, author William Poundstone delves into various thought experiments (like Searle's Chinese Room) to see whether they're actually coherent or not.
In one such exploration, he discusses Hilary Putnam’s idea of a Twin Earth, exactly like Earth circa 1750 AD, except that it doesn't have what we call water. Instead, it has a chemical, labeled 'XYZ', which is indistinguishable from water to ordinary observers (who only know what we knew in 1750, before the chemical composition of water was discovered). It is transparent, it quenches thirst, it fills lakes and oceans, it falls from the sky as rain.
Once again, this is the sort of thing humans seem capable of imagining. I can nod along and say “sure, a liquid that behaves just like water in every respect ordinarily observable in 1750, but isn’t.”
But a chemist, intimately familiar with the structure and behavior of molecules and with the properties of the elements and their isotopes, would be throwing up red flags.
“Just like water,” they might say, and I would nod.
“Liquid, and transparent, with a density of 997 kilograms per meter cubed.”
“Sure,” I would reply.
“Which freezes and melts at exactly 0º Celsius, and which boils and condenses at exactly 100º Celsius.”
“Yyyyeahhhh,” I would say, uneasiness settling in.
“Which makes up roughly 70% of the mass of the bodies of the humans of Twin Earth, and which is a solvent for hydrophilic substances, but not hydrophobic ones, and which can hold ions and polar substances in solution, and therefore dissolves salts, supports bodily fluids, and behaves in other familiar ways water does.”
“Um.”
The more we drill down into what we mean by “indistinguishable from water to observers in 1750”, the more it starts to become clear that there just isn't a possible substance which behaves exactly like water, but isn't. There are only so many configurations of electrons and protons and neutrons (especially while remaining small enough to mimic water's molarity, and to play water's role in various chemical interactions that would have been observable even to people in 1750).
Once again, our apparent ability to imagine “a substance that behaves exactly like water, but isn’t” is a product of our own confusion. Of the fuzziness of our concepts, the fast-and-loose-ness of our reasoning, our willingness to overlook a host of details which are actually crucially relevant to the question at hand.
(Tickling at the back of my mind is the axiom “your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.” The thing I'm gesturing toward seems to be a corollary of sorts.)
Of key importance:
Until we actually zero in on the incoherence, the imagined thing feels coherent. It seems every bit as potentially-real as actually-potentially-real options.
We have no internal feeling that warns us that it's a fabrication masquerading as a possibility. Our brains do not tell us when they're playing fast and loose.
Fabricated Options
Claim: When people disagree with one another, or are struggling with difficult decisions, they frequently include, among their perceived options, at least one option which is fake-in-the-way-that-XYZ-or-my-mental-model-of-gyroscopes-is-fake. An option that isn't actually an option at all, but which is a product of incoherent thinking.
This is what this essay seeks to point out, and to give you taste and triggers for. I would like to establish fabricated options as a category in your mind, so that you are more likely to notice them, and less likely to be taken in by them.
Example 1: Parental disapproval
Your kid wants to hang out with another kid who you're pretty sure is a bad influence.
Your kid wants to quit their piano lessons, sinking their previous three years of effort.
Your kid seems like they're about to start having sex, or using drugs, or playing Magic: the Gathering.
Your kid doesn't want to go to the family reunion.
Your kid doesn't want to eat that.
I see parents' hopes and expectations come up against the reality of their kids' preferences all the time, and I always have this sucking-in-a-breath, edge-of-my-seat anticipation, because it so often seems to me like parents fabricate options rather than dealing with the tradeoffs with eyes open. Parents seem to think things like:
“If I just tell them they can't hang out with that kid anymore, the problem will be solved.”
“If I just make them keep playing piano, they'll thank me later.”
“I can just tell them no.”
“I can just tell them they have to.”
“I can ground them until they comply."
It's not that there aren't good ways to intervene in the above situations. The claim is not “the options, as they are at this exact moment, are the only options that will ever be on the table.”
Rather, it's “there are a certain limited number of options on the table at this exact moment. If none of them are satisfactory, someone will have to actively create or uncover new ones. They can't be willed into being by sheer stubborn fiat.”
Option A, in each of the above scenarios, comes with massive costs, usually taken out of the value of the parent-child relationship.
Sure, you can ban your child from a given friendship, but what's going to actually happen (in many cases) is that your child will stop viewing you as their ally and start treating you as a prison warden or appointed overseer—as an obstacle to be dealt with. They'll either succeed at getting around your edict, and you'll have sacrificed a significant part of your mutual trust for nothing, or they'll fail, and resent you for it.
Some parents would argue that this is fine, it's worth it, better the kid be mad at me than suffer [bad outcome].
And in some cases that's genuinely true.
But most of the time, the thing the parent implicitly imagines—that they can get [good outcome] and it won't cost anything in terms of relationship capital—it's not really on the table. It hand-waves away all of the inconvenient and uncomfortable detail, in exactly the same fashion as “gyroscopes, but not weird.”
It's not “I'll make them play piano and everything will be fine” versus “they'll lose their piano-playing potential.”
It's “I'll make them play piano by using our mutual affection as kindling” or “I'll let them do what they want and preserve our relationship.”
Neither option is great, viewed through that lens. But that's the thing. Most of the time, neither option is great. In difficult situations, it's wise to be at least a little suspicious of straightforward, easy Options A that are just so clearly better than those uncomfortably costly tradeoff-y Options B.
A caveat: The observations above could be misinterpreted (both in the specific case of parenting, and in the more general case of fabricated options) as encouraging a sort of throw-up-your-hands, if-we-can't-solve-everything-we-shouldn't-bother-to-try-anything helplessness.
That's not the point. There are often ways to break the tradeoff dynamics at play, in any given situation. There are often third paths, and ways to cheat, and ways to optimize within the broken system to minimize negative effects and maximize positive outcomes.
But in order to have those intelligent effects, you first have to see and account for the relevant constraints and tradeoffs, and what I am attempting to point at with the above example is the common human tendency to not do so. To simply live in the fantasy world of simple-sounding but not-actually-possible options.
Example 2: Drowning
I have a longtime friend whom I'll refer to here as 'Taylor', who's got a longtime romantic partner whom I'll refer to here as 'Kelly'.
Kelly struggles with various mental health issues. They genuinely do their best, but as is so often the case in relationships, their best is sometimes not really “enough.” They spend the better part of each year depressed and mildly delusional, with frequent dangerous swerves into suicidality.
As a side effect of these issues, Kelly—who is at their core an excellent partner for Taylor—also puts Taylor through the wringer. Kelly has destroyed multiple of Taylor's possessions, multiple times. Kelly has screamed and yelled at Taylor, multiple times. Over and over, Taylor has asked Kelly what would help, what they can do, how they could change their own behavior to be a better partner for Kelly—and over and over, granting Kelly's explicit requests has resulted in Taylor being yelled at, punished, told to go away.
This has been rough.
Taylor is already the sort of person who doesn't give up on people—the sort of person who would willingly sacrifice themselves for a friend or a family member, the sort of person who will go to genuinely extreme lengths to save a fellow human in trouble.
And on top of that, Taylor genuinely loves Kelly, and has plenty of evidence that—when things are okay—Kelly genuinely loves Taylor.
But for years now, the situation has been spiraling, and Taylor has been getting more and more exhausted and demoralized, and it has become increasingly clear that neither Taylor's direct efforts, nor any of the other resources they've funneled Kelly's way (therapists, medication, financial stability, freedom of movement), are going to be sufficient. It no longer seems reasonable to expect things to get better.
Taylor and I have talked about the situation a lot, and one of the metaphors that has come up more and more often is that of a drowning person out in rough waters.
From Taylor's point of view, saving Kelly is worth it. Saving Kelly is worth it even if it means Taylor goes under. From Taylor's point of view, the options have always been “help save Kelly, or watch Kelly drown.”
But I think it’s important to consider the possibility that this frame is broken. At this point, it's plausible that "help save Kelly" is not a real option. That it's a fabrication, conjured up because it is deeply uncomfortable to face the real choice, which is “let Kelly drown, or drown with them.”
(Alternatively, and a little less harshly: “let Kelly figure out how to swim on their own, or keep trying to help them and drown, yourself, without actually having helped them float.”)
The False Appeal of Fabricated Options
Sometimes people think the options are A or B, and they are in fact B or C, and sometimes people think the options are A or B and they are, but their imagination distorts the impact of option A into something utterly unrealistic.
For the sake of thinking about the category “fabricated options,” this distinction is not especially relevant. The important thing to note is that in either case, the fabricated option has inflated relative appeal.
Either it's like Case 1 in the image above: a genuinely available action A wrapped up in an incoherent and unrealistic story that makes it sound better than the unappealing action B. Or it's like Case 2 in the image above: an entirely made-up option A which makes the actual best option B look bad in comparison (causing us to fail to shoot for B over an even worse default C).
In both cases, the result in practice is that option B, which is usually sort of dour and uninspiring and contains unpleasant costs or tradeoffs, gets something like disproportionately downvoted. Downvoted relative to an impossible standard (the fabricated option)—treated as worse than it ought to be treated, given constraints.
It's a common assumption among both rationalists and the population at large that people tend to flinch away from things which are unpleasant to think about. However, people rarely take the time to spell out just what “flinching” means, in practice, or just what triggers it.
The fabrication of options is, I claim, one example of flinching. It’s one of the things we do, as humans, when we feel ourselves about to be forced into choosing an uncomfortable path. There’s a sense of “surely not” that sends our minds in any other available direction, and if we’re not careful—if we do not actively hold ourselves to a certain kind of stodgy actuarial insistence-on-clarity-and-coherence—we’ll more than likely latch onto a nearby pleasant fiction without ever noticing that it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
“If only they would just [calm down/listen/take a deep breath/forgive me/let it go/have a little perspective/not be so jealous/not be so irrational/think things through more carefully/realize how much I love them/hang on just a little bit longer], everything would be fine.”
Pleasant fictions always outnumber pleasant truths, after all.
Conclusion
A likely thought on the minds of some readers is that this isn't exactly new ground, and we already have all of the pieces necessary to individually identify each instance of fabricated options based on their inherent falsehood, and therefore don't actually need the new category.
I disagree; I find that fine distinctions are generally useful and have personally benefitted from being able to port strategies between quite different instances of option fabrication, and from being able to train my option-fabrication-recognizer on a broad data set.
That being said: beware the failure mode of new jargon, which is thinking that you now recognize [the thing], rather than that you are now equipped to hypothesize [maybe the thing?]. The world would be a better place if people's response to the reification of concepts like “sealioning” or “DARVO” or “attention-deficit disorder” were to ask whether that’s what's happening here, and how we would know as opposed to immediately weaponizing them.
(Alas, even that's a fabricated option. The real choice is between “invent good terms but see them misused a bunch” and “refuse to invent good terms.”)
As for what to do about fabricated options (both those your own brain generates and those generated by others), the general recommendation is pretty much “use your rationality” and there isn’t room in this one essay to operationalize that. My apologies.
If you’re looking for specific resources that might come in handy here, I'd point you toward:
Cognitive Trigger-Action Plans (especially ones for noticing fabricated options as they come up, or booting up your alert awareness in situations where they're likely to)
Murphyjitsu (which is likely to improve people's baseline ability to both recognize glossed-over fairy tales and patch the holes therein)
You might also work on building your general noticing skill, perhaps starting with any number of writings by Logan Strohl, and on double crux and similar tools, which will make it easier to make disagreements over the menu-of-options productive rather than not.
Good luck.
Guest author bio: Duncan Sabien is a teacher, writer, and maker of things, with a special interest in psychology and small-scale social dynamics. He likes to joke that he is a "feral rationalist," and lives in the woods with his spouse, their toddler, and a giant trampoline. You can read more of his work at his Substack, here. |
Note: This is an abridged version of Duncan Sabien's original essay, adapted for the Clearer Thinking audience. You can see the full version (which includes additional examples and background) here.
