Flipism

Flipism, sometimes spelled "flippism", is a

In the original 1952 comic book, Donald Duck meets the eccentric Professor Batty, who persuades Donald to make decisions based on flipping a coin at every crossroad of life:^[5] "Life is but a gamble! Let flipism chart your ramble!" Donald soon gets into trouble when following this advice. He drives a one way road in the wrong direction and is fined $50. The reason for the fine is not his bad driving, but rather the fact that he relied on a coin to do his thinking instead of deciding for himself.^[6]

In decision-making

Flipism is a normative decision theory in a sense that it prescribes how decisions should be made. In the comic, flipism shows remarkable ability to make right conclusions without any information—but only once in a while. In reality, flipping a coin would only lead to random decisions. However, there is an article about benefits of some randomness in the decision-making process in certain conditions. It notes:^[7]

Though the author himself may have intended this as a rejection of the idea that rationality (in the standard sense) has some special claim to superiority as a basis for making decisions, what he may really have discovered are the potential benefits of strategic commitment to randomization.

Commitment to a non-trivial mixed strategy can be beneficial for the informed party in a potential conflict under asymmetric information, as it allows the player to manipulate his opponent’s beliefs in an optimal fashion. Such a strategy also makes the player less inclined to enter into conflict when it is avoidable.

Another way of seeing the utility of flipism in decision-making can be called "

Still a third approach is to look at flipism as the endpoint of a continuum bounded on the other side by perfectly rational decision-making. Flipism requires the minimum possible cognitive overhead to make decisions, at the price of making sub-optimal choices. Truly rational decision-making requires a tremendous investment in information and cognition to arrive at an optimal decision. However, the expected marginal value of information gathered (discounted for risk and uncertainty) is often lower than the marginal cost of the information or processing itself. The concept of bounded rationality posits that people employ cognitive parsimony, gathering only what they expect to be sufficient information to arrive at a satisficing (or "good enough") solution. Flipism is therefore a rational strategy to employ when the cost of information is very high relative to its expected value, and using it is an example of motivated tactical thinking.

This is a commonly recognized

• Magic 8-ball
  , or rolling a die.
• Accepting the first option that seems like it might achieve the desired result (known as "satisficing"), given the marginal effort involved in trying to process the information and optimize the result.
• tarot cards, revelation, methods of divination or other forms of divination or oracular devices
  .
• The "highest paid person's opinion" (HiPPO).[8]

These forms are in contradistinction to analytics, a commonly used method of data-based decision making.^[8]

According to Kevin Durand and Mary Leigh, flipism is "a psychological tool, and not an agent of fate".^[9] It is neither a revelation of the wishes of the head of state (e.g., Julius Caesar, whose head was on the coin, ergo, heads showed "Caesar's will") nor the divination of a deity's will.^[9]

There are those who view the resort to flipism to be a disavowal of responsibility for making personal and societal decisions based upon rationality.^{[6][citation needed]} However, in the end, flipism shows surprising efficiency in guiding some decisions.^{[6][citation needed]}

Similar concepts

In

Flipism is a film trope that is used to argue for "the supremacy of free will in a chaotic world".^[9]

• Batman villain Two-Face (Harvey Dent) is entirely reliant on flipping his signature coin in order to make decisions due to his inability to decide anything for himself.^[12]
• In the 2020 novel 'The Flip Side' by James Bailey (writer), the main character relies on tossing a coin to make all his decisions.^[13]
• A record company named "Flippist Records" in Minneapolis, Minnesota.^[14]
• The story "Flip Decision" has been a subject of linguistic research about translations from English to Finnish, and specifically to Helsinki slang.^[15]
• The book
  The Book of the Die.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• The philosophy is practiced by Jake Nyman, a character in the film American Perfekt.^{[citation needed]}
• In the movie King-Kong vs. Godzilla, Mr. Tako, head of Pacific Pharmaceuticals, is seen in multiple scenes flipping a coin which seem to rule his decision making.
• In the novel
  dissertation on the concept.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• The fictitious religion in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game includes a god of luck, trade and thieves. Many of its priests who embrace the first aspect are said to use flipism for every important decision.^{[citation needed]}
• In the television series Futurama, the episode "The Farnsworth Parabox" depicts an alternate universe which only differs in that decisions made by flipping coins have the opposite result, with a flip of "heads" in the existing universe being "tails" in the alternate.^{[citation needed]}
• An episode of The Big Bang Theory sees Sheldon Cooper resolving to make all of his life decisions based on the roll of a die. This eventually results in him growing a goatee and wearing dirty underwear. In another episode, Sheldon tries revealed preference for selecting his next game platform, to no avail.^{[citation needed]}
• Science fiction author and satirist Leo P. Kelly's novel The Coins of Murph depicts a
  nuclear war.^[16][17]
• In chapter 57, season 5 of
  House of Cards, the character Frank Underwood talks about flipism in solving deadlock situations during election, since the founding fathers did not mention it, and describes "flip decision" as "one of my favorites."^[18][19]
• Danish poet and scientist Piet Hein wrote a poem entitled "A Psychological Tip", describing the advantages of coin flipping in decision making.^[20]
  He wrote: