Do the more rare thing

We often face complicated decisions with lots of factors to them. We all struggle with these. Sometimes you can line up the factors and make a rubric for deciding. Picking a college? Well, what matters to you? Weather, academics, location, surrounding city? You can rank each of these, say, from 1 to 10, and add them up. It’s not perfect but that gives you some kind of idea of which one you like better.

That’s a good example of reducing the dimensions of a problem so that you can impose a strict ordering (metric) on it, but often that reduction doesn’t really capture the whole story. They might tie, or there might be a factor on each side that’s really strong, but it’s different in each case, and you’re back to either/or that’s fairly balanced.

However you get there, if you have that kind of otherwise balanced choice, one nice rule of thumb for breaking the tie is simply “take the option that is more rare (less common/harder to get)”. The idea is fairly simple - if the other choice is less rare/easier to get, you’re more likely to be able to reverse your decision in that direction. And also, you may not be able to get the rare option later - part of making a choice is being worried about regretting the choice, and this is a small amount of insurance against that.

This isn’t universal or foolproof by any means - sometimes it’s also hard to tell what’s “more rare”! But it can help in surprisingly many circumstances. It’s a nice external “forcing function” that gives you a way to choose without having to agonize about it too much.