Decision maker

The mechanism is older than the tool. Randomising a choice does not tell you what to do, but your response to the answer usually does. The moment a coin lands, most people discover they were hoping for the other side, and that reaction is the reason to use something like this for a small decision.

There is one large-scale test of the idea, and it points slightly further than the folk version. Steven Levitt ran a field experiment in which people stuck on a decision flipped a coin to settle it, collecting over 20,000 tosses on questions as big as quitting a job or ending a relationship. Six months later, the people whose coin told them to make the change were more likely to have made it, and reported being measurably happier than those told to keep things as they were. His reading was not that coins are wise; it was that people are systematically too cautious about change, so a nudge in that direction tends to land well. Treat that as a finding about the average person facing a genuine deadlock, not as permission to outsource a decision you have not thought about.

The eight answers here are not four yeses and four noes. Two say do it, two say leave it, and the remaining four hand the decision back to you in one form or another: wait, ask someone, go with your instinct, take the other one. So the chance of a straight answer is one in two, and half the time the page is deliberately refusing to be the thing you delegated to. Given that a decision that matters deserves the deliberation, that refusal is the right proportion.