Decision Making - Abhishek Chakraborty (Page 3)

Working Hypothesis: How to Avoid Fooling Yourself

Facts don’t change our minds. The mind is stubborn, and no matter how strong the facts are, we undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. Ironically, the same brain that empowers rational thinking also skews our judgments.

Circuit Breakers: How to Walk Away from the Best Deals

The best deals are the ones you can walk away from. This is taken to the extreme when you face a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that is slipping off your hands. How do you decide whether to press harder, or to give up? Mountaineer Ed Viesturs may have something to teach us.

Thought Experiments

Thought Experiments help us engage in deliberate reasoning by exploring various circumstances, and predict their implications without conducting any real life experiments. Mastering thought experiments can help us stretch our minds by confronting difficult questions.

Optionality: When More is Merrier

When you have options, you don’t have to care about the average outcome—only the favourable outcomes. Because your wins far outweigh your losses. You get a larger payoff when you are right, which also makes it unnecessary to be right too often.

Private v Public Decisions

A private decision is something that affects only you. A public decision, on the other hand, affects others as well—who don’t take part in the decision-making process. Therefore, how you approach them are completely different.

Invisible Rules

Our thoughts and decisions have a set of taken-for-granted assumptions behind them. These are the Invisible Rules that guide us. Unless we uncover them, it’s almost impossible to understand what’s driving our decisions, and what are the flaws, if any, in our logic and thinking.

Chasing Uncertainty

The future is uncertain. No matter what we think or believe, we have no control over it. Uncertainty will be a factor in everything we undertake. It makes no sense to try to guess it. The best we can do is to learn to control what we can, i.e., our thinking, our decision process, and our reactions.

What it Takes to be a Contrarian

When you take a position the market disagrees with, or when you build upon an idea that everyone says is ridiculous, it pays off tremendously. Being a contrarian has its benefits. The question is, how do you become one?