Many of our decisions have no strong rationale either way.

• Which of these four alternatives should we try first to improve our profitability?
• Which cloud provider should we rely on for primary services?
• Which job offer should I accept?
• How much time should we spend on paying down technical debt?

A decision needs to be made, but among decent alternatives, we can’t really single out one clearly superior option. This means whatever we decide, it will ultimately be arbitrary.

Admitting to an arbitrary decision makes us look not-analytical and not-intuitive, so we look to others to validate our decision and lend it legitimacy. This is the reason we pay astrologers, witch-doctors, macroeconomists, and management consultants; they are all people that generate decisions with the rational capacity of a pair of dice, but we pretend they know what they are doing so their support turns an arbitrary decision into a legitimate one. Result: we are no worse off, but we sleep better at night.

These professions hide how clueless we are behind fancy words and speculative hypotheses. They serve a social function, rather than a technical one. The decision is just as arbitrary as before.

In section five of Scott Alexander’s review of The Secret of Our Success he quotes the author explaining how Naskapi foragers decide where to hunt for caribou:

Traditionally, Naskapi hunters decided where to go to hunt using divination and believed that the shoulder bones of caribou could point the way to success. To start the ritual, the shoulder blade was heated over hot coals in a way that caused patterns of cracks and burnt spots to form. This patterning was then read as a kind of map, which was held in a pre-specified orientation. The cracking patterns were (probably) essentially random from the point of view of hunting locations, since the outcomes depended on myriad details about the bone, fire, ambient temperature, and heating process. Thus, these divination rituals may have provided a crude randomizing device that helped hunters avoid their own decision-making biases.

This randomness serves much the same function as randomness in poker or rock-paper-scissors: in adversarial situations, deterministic and systematic strategies can be exploited. The caribou can learn how the Naskapi hunt – unless they randomise their decisions. Of course, they didn’t admit to this randomisation. The cracking pattern is a message from the deities.

Sometimes the astrologer (or management consultant, or heated bone) does not directly decide, but they inject enough randomness into the decision process to kick loose a few rocks and spark the creativity of the real decision-maker.1¹ Weinberg talks a lot about this in his Secrets of Consulting book series, where he calls it jiggling the system.

The advice only changes every ten minutes.

There have been some attempts at this type of tool previously, aimed at product development or navigating organisational politics. Many of them try to reinvent the actual cards both with artwork and switching to more modern interpretations. Common to them all is that they didn’t – at least in my opinion – actually end up very good.

One of the strengths of these old Tarot cards is that they are so broadly interpretable and adaptable. Capturing that in a more modern set would take a lot of time and effort, which would at best be incidental to the purpose of the tool. Thus, the most efficient way forward has been to lean into the Rider–Waite card designs, as they are known.

If you are confident in your abilities to generate a fresh set of cohesive graphics with wide interpretability and you want to contribute to this, I would be more than happy to hear about it!