Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win?
Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself.
Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself.
Respecting the base rate means figuring out what the odds of an outcome is, and assuming that it applies to you. Here's what that looks like when used as a thinking technique.
Five ways to do noise reduction, from the field of judgment and decision making.
Results from the BIN paper, or why reducing noise in your decision making is far easier than fighting your cognitive biases.
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.
Thinking is split roughly into pattern matching against experience, and reasoning from first principles. Here's one argument for why you need both.