This is Serious: A Selection from Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander’s Surfaces and Essences (2013)

“In their book Mental Leaps, psychologists Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard tell the droll story of a fictitious researcher in decision-making who has the luck of being offered a job in a prestigious rival institution, which throws him into a major dilemma. If he accepts the job, his salary and professional prestige will both take leaps, but on the other hand, the move would be a huge emotional upheaval for his entire family. A colleague whom he privately asks for advice reacts, ‘Hey, what’s with you? You’re one of the world’s experts on how decisions are made. Why are you coming to see me? You’re the one who invented super-sophisticated statistical models for making optimal decisions. Apply your own work to your dilemma; that’ll tell you what to do!’ His friend looks at him straight in the eye and says, ‘Come off it, would you? This is serious!’

The fact is that when we are faced with serious decisions, although we can certainly draw up a list of all sorts of outcomes, assigning them numerical weights that reflect their likelihoods of happening as well as the amount of pleasure they would bring us, on the basis of which we can then calculate the ‘optimal’ choice, this is hardly the way that people who are in the throes of major decision-making generally proceed. What we all do in such situations is to draw on one or more analogues in our memory. Here are a few types of familiar and important situations in life categories we all know in which people automatically behave in this way.”—Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (2013)