[feoren]

Yeesh, I don't know. I think we have enough data to decide the shape of the Earth, yet there are still Flat Earthers. Your approach works in an idealized world where everyone is perfectly rational and emotionless and all facts are perfectly knowable. That's really not the world we live in. This is basically a hardline stance at the extreme "endless debate" side: if literally anyone in the room is disagreeing, then you must not have enough data to make a decision yet? I don't see that working in practice.

[iancmceachern]

This is reducto ad absurdum. It's not a 100% or 0% thing.

Obvious means that there is a 51% chance that decision a is better than decision b.

I'm advocating against just guessing when it's 50/50

[feoren]

A lot of decisions come from experience and expertise. There are hundreds of little data points that all come together in my brain when I make an engineering decision, and I can't even necessarily enumerate them all. It's exhausting to have to justify every decision to others. Gathering data on 100 approaches that don't work is just too expensive. Sometimes you should just let experts be experts and defer to them, even if they can't exactly say why.

[iancmceachern]

>"It's exhausting to have to justify every decision to others"

You sound like a real pleasure /s

It's our job to. It's why they teach us to show our work. It's why we have building inspections. It's a necessary "evil". The sooner you accept, and embrace it, the more fun you will have in your day to day life, and more joy you will bring on others.