One bad decision I’ve made several times before, is leaving homework until the literal morning before it’s due. I don’t just procrastinate until the night before, I go to bed and decide to wake up a little earlier than usual in order to do my homework. Similar to Dan Gilbert’s discussion of not considering all the different factors properly, I weigh how stressed and tired I feel the night before, as more important than how stressed and tired I’ll feel in the morning. Because I value my immediate comfort more than my future comfort. However this always makes me have a bad day afterwards. In addition, I don’t have as much time to do my homework in mornings so it could get cut short before I finish it. Part of the reason I don’t take this into account is that I use inductive logic to judge whether I’ll be able to finish my homework in the morning. In the past it has always worked, so why won’t it work this time? One of the ways of knowing is knowledge, and I think I consider it far more than I do the others such as reason and mathematics when I decide to do homework the morning right before school. In this situation I also do not properly weigh the validity of my premises. I think, I am tired, and tired people should go to bed, therefore I should go to bed. However, this syllogism is not valid, because while my two premises are true, they are not the only premises and I’m not taking all the data into account when making my decision.
