Tuesday, March 9, 2021

How to Decide

Today's blog post is based on a podcast from The Art of Manliness:

We all make many decisions every single day. From little ones like what to eat for breakfast, to big ones like whether to take a new job. Given how regularly we’re deciding, we certainly have a vested interest in getting better at this skill. But how do we do so? How can we get better at making big choices, and spend less time dithering over the insignificant minutiae that often overwhelms our mental bandwidth? And why didn’t anyone teach us how to do this stuff to begin with?

My guest today has written a book that offers an education in a subject matter many of us missed out on. Her name is Annie Duke, she’s a former professional poker player and decision-making expert and strategist, and her latest book is How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. Today on the show, Annie shares many of those practical tools, beginning with how to overcome hindsight bias and “resulting” — our tendency to judge decisions based on their outcomes — by doing something called “knowledge tracking.” We discuss how to figure out the probabilities for things that seem difficult to predict and the importance of embracing an “archer’s mindset.” When then get into when you should make decisions slowly, when you can speed up, how to employ the “only option” test when making a choice, and why when a decision is hard, it’s actually easy.

Here are the highlights from the program:

  • Why don’t we teach decision making to kids and students?
  • What is resulting? How does it get in the way of our making better decisions?
  • How to fight hindsight bias with “knowledge tracking” 
  • Making a decision tree that actually works 
  • How to assign probabilities and make predictions when you have little to no information 
  • Why you need an archer’s mindset — or, why hitting the bull’s eye is overrated 
  • How better decision making can make you more resilient against poor decisions 
  • Applying the “only option” test as a way to choose between choices that don’t fundamentally matter

This was a very interesting topic! I mentioned Annie's previous apperance on AoM in aa earlier blog post.

You may also want to check out yesterday's blog post about improving your perception.

Interesting days




Week long celebrations:
Mar 7 - Mar 13: No More Week  
Mar 7 - Mar 13: Women in Construction Week
Mar 7 - Mar 13: Procrastination Week

Mar 8 - Mar 14: Feet Week

Next Tuesday - Lips Appreciation Day, St. Urho’s Day, No Selfies Day, Panda Day and Freedom Of Information Day

Week long celebrations:
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