1. People often times aren't interested in knowing the truth and in those cases the observer position doesn't help them.

2. Sometimes there isn't enough information to make the correct decision, and even with all the information at hand there is no proof to your specialness even though you are special.

Here are my responses.

1. I was responding to the part of your post where you said that knowing about the dilemma doesn't help you even if you want to be helped. It is in those cases where I'm offering a solution (as in the cases of my clients, they want to change what isn't working in their life).

2. This problem has nothing to do with the ego. It is simply a case of not enough information. The same issue would come up when deciding on which route to take to work where you have incomplete information. As I said in my original response
“If the question at hand wouldn't be solved any better by an uninterested party who has all of the information that the person involved, then this has nothing to do with ego. It's called “the not having all the information dilemma”.”

You also said “If you are able to teach the neutral observer decision to people easily, I'm impressed. Often, what happens is that people will accept the logic of the neutral observer decision intellectually but then arbitrarily make the decision that the neutral observer is wrong.”

Here lies the secret of the neutral observer position. It's not an intellectual exercise! It's an exercise of imagination, subjective experience, and emotion. We don't “prove” anything, we explore perceptions for a different emotional standpoint. When done as an imagination game it is very very powerful and very very effective.
Use the exact words and formula I gave for creating a powerful experience. The exact words I use have been carefully refined after working with it many many times.

Joe

Try telling a Christian that there exists equally devoted believers of a mutually contradictory faith. Every time I've done it, they get to a certain point of reasoning before defaulting back to “they must be wrong and I must be right because I'm special”.

But the dilemma doesn't come from not being able to apply the neutral observer decision, the dilemma comes from not knowing when it applies. Sometimes, the neutral observer is wrong, you genuinely are special and you should believe in your specialness. It's being able to distinguish these instances from when your mind is fooling itself that is the dilemma.

If the question at hand wouldn't be solved any better by an uninterested party who has all of the information that the person involved, then this has nothing to do with ego. It's called “the not having all the information dilemma”.

I would presume that we are talking about a case where your ability to process the information and make a rational decision is warped because of the fact that you strongly desire a certain outcome. It's like any situation where a strong emotion destroys our logical decision making process. Just observe how any depressed person comes to the logical conclusion that “it's not worth it and it wont work” and after taking his meds comes to the logical conclusion that “it is worth it and it will work”.

The solution is rather simple and quick, but it takes 2 minutes of hard work. Close your eyes and imagine that you are an outside observer looking at yourself, who knows all the information you know, but isn't affected at all by this decision. Imagine looking through the observer eyes, hearing through his ears, and feeling the observers emotions (curiosity, disinterest, and any other observer emotion you can think up). Really get into it, take a full minute to imagine the scene. THEN have a go at the decision.

This process, which I call the “neutral observer decision”, is one that I teach to all of my clients and is one that works very very well. Teaching it to yourself is even easier because there is less of a temptation to be dishonest as to appear that you didn't make a mistake.

If after all this you don't have a clear solution, it simply means that you lack enough information. This has nothing to do with ego at all.

Joe

Here are the facts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenuptial_agreement

You miss one crucial distinction here. You are implying that your prototypical example of divorce is a truly random coin-toss like phenomenon. It is not. It is far more like the stock market, with 2 effects: private knowledge and the self-fulfilling prophecy effect. The 3rd response gets to that.

I wouldn't go so far as to conjecture that pre-nups would correlate with higher divorce rates (other confounding variables could come into play, like maybe pre-nup signers being wiser to begin with, and more likely to have made a good choice), but the couple's stance is a rational one. It is the same reason venture capitalists like to keep startup CEO paychecks low (and stock ownership high).

The fourth response is just the most inarticulate version of expression of private information. The couple COULD actually have verifiable information that they are special. For instance, John Gottman's studies show that a great lead predictor of divorce is simply the couple's ratio of “good” to “bad” (contemptuous in particular) moves in a conversation. When that ration is less than about 5:1, chances of eventual divorce skyrocket.

Imagine a couple that knows nothing of Gottman's work, but vaguely, intuitively grasps that they seem to “fight less” than other couples. This feeling could be so subconscious that they can't explain the source of their certainty beyond “we are special.”

Of course, whether the sense of certainty is based on true (realized or subconscious) evidence of outlier-ship, or just a desperate rationalization/denial of deeper doubts, only history can tell.

But the point is, as in the stock market, private information can give you some control over what seems like a pretty random process in the aggregate.

A much simpler and clearer example is in people's reactions to life-expectancy statistics. On the face of it predicting you will live to be a 100 when average life expectancy is 80 seems like foolish denial of the dynamics of mortality. But in fact somebody old enough to make such a statement ALREADY has a private expectation of living beyond 80, since the aggregate stats reflect people who have died before the person in question. The conditional probability, based on current state (and private knowledge) is different from the random sample probability.

But I am nitpicking. Overall, a nice argument and conceptualization here. I like the phrase 'ego dilemma' and there are definitely cases when the sense of certainty is completely unfounded and unjustifiable. There ARE people who think they'll live forever.