A billionaire tech investor, Yuri Milner, accompanied his daughter for an ice-cream at Tin Pot Creamery in Los Altos, California. Yours truly happened to be inside. The daughter got two flavors. The lady at the counter asked which scoop she'd like at the bottom of the cone and which one on top. And that's when the hesitation kicked in as the daughter struggled to decide, mentally trying to evaluate which order would bring the most pleasure. After what must have felt like an eternity for him, Yuri Milner stepped in: "Put the cookie monster scoop on top, please."
To some extent, the daughter acted like a donkey from the classic Buridan's ass paradox. Imagine a donkey located between two identical piles of hay. The donkey is hungry. Which haystack will the donkey choose? Typically, the donkey picks the closer one. However, in this illustration, the piles are an equal distance away. How will the donkey decide? Randomizing will make the donkey feel that it's relegating its fate to a coin toss—hardly an empowering move for a sentient being with free will. The paradox predicts the donkey's starvation to death, not being able to make up its mind.
This donkey is strikingly similar to Elliot, a famous patient of a renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. After a brain tumor removal, Elliot's life turned upside down for no easily diagnosable reason. A successful businessman before the surgery, he lost his job, divorced, remarried and divorced again, and lost his money through a series of poor financial decisions. Damasio eventually discovered that Elliot lost the ability to feel emotions—the tumor's excision must have damaged the brain's emotional functions. Without feeling strong emotions for virtually anything, Elliot struggled to get himself to pursue any consequential action, whether it was getting out of bed in the morning or following through on a business project. Effectively, he was like a donkey stuck between two haystacks not experiencing a pull strong enough in either direction.
If the donkey had anything but the haystacks on its mind... if it had emotions and feelings beyond hunger... if it got excited about changing the world through million-dollar investments after that food intake, it would have realized that it does not matter which haystack to approach first. Pick any. Yuri Milner knows that.
