Will Price has a fantastic post summarizing a Princeton paper on “the pursuit and misuse of useless information.” He sums up the paper well by talking about how we love to obtain additional, useless information before making a decision and then how we let that noninstrumental information affect the process. It seems to me that people think about these things when making *big* decisions, so our real losses come during all those day-to-day decisions that we make without thinking twice and, given our bad habits, we fall prey to these fallacies.
I think the best place for insights into how to avoid this trap is to talk with the Marine Corps.
They are the masters of rapid decisionmaking.