Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

Obviously, we all want good outcomes, but as we’ve seen, good decisions can have bad outcomes, and bad decisions can have good ones. Evaluating decisions—ours or others’—based on the outcome (or how we feel about the outcome) fails to distinguish luck from skill and control. Because of that, engaging in resulting doesn’t help us get better. The res

Life is filled with the need to be persuasive. Arguments are more effective when we demonstrate that we have considered the second-order effects and put effort into verifying that these are desirable as well.

What Nutt’s research made clear was how important it is to deliberately carve out a phase of the decision process within which entirely new alternatives are explored, to resist the easy gravitational pull toward the initial framing of the decision, particularly if it happens to take the form of a “whether or not” single alternative.

Assess the reliability of your prediction and fine-tune. How good we are at making decisions depends a great deal on what we are trying to predict.