Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)
In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think" because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation of the hardest games to win being already won positions because there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start doing something really stupid akin to the example of having too much choice in the article.<p>I think a nice collective analogue to this is Alfred Whitehead's observation that <i>'civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them'</i>. Progress is being made by holistically integrating knowledge in a way that makes it sort of ambient.<p>It also reminds me of a slightly snarky article why all the people in the rationalist cult never seem to actually be successful at anything other than rationalism. It's precisely because consciously thinking is easy, it's the integration of knowledge into the whole  is what's difficult but actually necessary.