Decision Making - Abhishek Chakraborty (Page 2)

The Limits of Our Reasoning

Statistical concepts such as regression are confounding. While they have an explanation, they don’t have any cause. Our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and cannot swallow the reason for something being “mere statistics.”

Probability is Not Destiny

If a hundred people eat a chicken burger every day from the local eatery, over the course of a lifetime one of them will get colon cancer (in addition to the five who would have gotten it regardless). That’s not a risk you may want to take, but it’s not a death sentence for sure.

That One Quality of a Good Decision Maker

A startup that has been in business for about two years, and that is growing pretty well, has just been offered a billion dollars. The twenty-something founder, after considering the offer long and hard, refuses to pass.

All Things Don’t Scale

Every strategy, rule, and principle has an acceptable size where things work well, but break when we try to scale them into a different size or speed. There are no human-sized hamsters for a reason.

The Problem is Not the Problem

A lot of us waste our time worrying about specific problems — how to deliver a project, how to get funding, how to crack an interview — whereas the real problem is we don’t know how to think about the problem correctly.

Strong Opinions Weakly Held

This is a great principle to move forward despite uncertainty. But the problem arises when bad agents in a group abuse it and turn strong opinions weakly held into strong opinions assumed to be true until you prove otherwise.

What Disasters Can Teach Us About Good System Design

The Chernobyl disaster didn’t happen simply because of Soviet Communist top-down regime. The Challenger disaster didn’t happen simply because of the O-ring seals failure. These so called “root causes” are part of many reasons, and they are definitely not the main reason.

Relaxation: Why the Next Best Option is the Best Option

When somebody tells you to relax, it’s probably because you’re uptight and you make a bigger deal problems than you should. Here’s some counterintuitive advice: you don’t have to relax yourself. Relax your problems instead.