Thinking Better

Game analogies can be helpful when you're playing to win. But there's a limit to how useful they can be when thinking about life.

There's a saying commonly attributed to Charlie Munger that goes 'Take a Simple Idea and Take It Seriously'. Work out all the implications. Seek out all the case studies. Here's a story of two investors who did exactly that.

Why it's important not to hold too tightly to any one explanatory narrative during a period of high uncertainty.

M. Mitchell Waldrop's book on the Santa Fe Institute is a gateway drug to a powerful if subtle idea. Here's why it matters.

Sensemaking is hard. Sensemaking around a possible paradigm shift is even harder. What's the narrative for crypto? What is crypto good for?

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.