“A sultan has granted a commoner a chance to marry one of his n daughters. The commoner will be presented with the daughters one at a time and, when each daughter is presented, the commoner will be told the daughter’s dowry (which is fixed in advance). Upon being presented with a daughter, the commoner must immediately decide whether to accept or reject her (he is not allowed to return to a previously rejected daughter). However, the sultan will allow the marriage to take place only if the commoner picks the daughter with the overall highest dowry. Then what is the commoner’s best strategy, assuming he knows nothing about the distribution of dowries (Mosteller 1987)?”

Mosteller, F. “Choosing the Largest Dowry.” Problem 47 in Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions. New York: Dover, pp. 73-77, 1987.

But of course in real life all the assumptions of the problem aren’t that easy: dowries aren’t fixed, we can have an idea of the distribution of dowries (or at least it wouldn’t be random), in practice it could be possible to return to a rejected daughter, etc…

So, I agree, when there are too many things to consider, just choose with your gut, because you won’t be able to reason correctly about all the “what ifs”…