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MattFisher comments on Rationality Quotes: June 2011 - Less Wrong
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I try to avoid over-optimising on considered principles. I am willing to accept less-than-optimal outcomes based on the criteria I actually consider because those deficits are more often than not compensated by reduced thinking time, reduced anxiety, and unexpected results (eg the movie turning out to be much better or worse than expected).
'Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart' indicates most decisions are actually made by considering a single course of action, and taking it unless there is some unacceptable problem with it. What really surprised the researchers was that this often does better than linear recursion and stacks up respectably against Bayesian reasoning.
So my answer is, "make random selections from the menu until you hit something you're willing to eat." :)
Once again, the problem isn't "How do I ignore rules and go with my gut?", it's "What do I do when my gut says 'Search me'?". So your answer isn't so much "random until satisficing by intuitive standards", and more like "random". Which is dominated by rules if rules exist, and the current best candidate if they don't.
Ah. So if I understand correctly, your intuition on what will satisfice sometimes returns zero information, which certainly happens to me sometimes and I would guess most people. In that situation, I switch from optimising on the decision as presented, and optimise on <choose and implement decision procedure> + <decision as presented>.
In most cases, the variance in utility over the spread of outcomes of the decision is outweighed by the reduced cognitive effort and anxiety in the simplified decision procedure. Plus there's the chance of exposure to an unexpected benefit.
In other words, there may be a choice that is better than the current best candidate (however that was derived), and rules may exist that dominate "random", but it's not worth your time and effort to figure them out.