- Triage
Focus on questions where your hard work is likely to pay off - don’t waste your efforts on “easy glock-wise” questions where easy rules of thumb can get you close to the right answer or impenetrable “cloud-like” questions where even fancy statistical models can beat the dart-throwing chimp; concentrate your efforts in the goldilocks zone
10 systems to improve forecasts - 1-5
- Triage
- Break it down into smaller problems
- Right balance between inside and outside views
- Believe updating
- Look for the clashing causal forces in each problem
- Break down smaller problems
Fermi-problems - decompose problem in knowable and unknowable parts - flesh out your assumptions - fermi-izing very important
- Right balance between inside and outside views
There is “nothing new under the sun”; creative searches for comparative events; outside-view question: How often things of this sort happen for things of this sort (e.g. Luke with Nintendo?)
- Believe updating
It can be boring, occasionally uncomfortable, but still very important; Skill-full updating requires pulling subtle signals from noisy news-flows all the while resisting wishful thinking
- Look for the clashing causal forces in each problem
Normally, always at least one good counter-argument; “Dragon-fly synthesizing” of different views
10 systems to improve forecasts - 5-11
- Distinguish an adequate amount of degrees of doubt
- Strike the balance between under- and overconfidence
- Look for the errors behind your mistakes, but beware of review mirror error hindsight biases
- Bring out the best in others, and let others bring out the best in you
- Master the air-balancing bicycle
- Don’t treat commandments as commandments
- Strive to distinguish as many degrees of doubt as the problem permits, but no more
Nuance matters, like in Poker, you are better if you can distinguish 60-40 bets from 40-60 bets, or 55-45 from 45-55, etc.
- Strike the balance between under- and overconfidence, between prudence and decisiveness
Trade-off between “waffler” and “blow-hard”; trade-off between misses and false-alarms
- Look for the errors behind your mistakes, but beware of review mirror error hindsight biases
Unflinching post-mortems; Where did you go wrong; but it is possible also to “learn too much”, maybe you were generally on the right track; also, maybe you were just lucky
- Bring out the best in others, and let others bring out the best in you
Understand the arguments of the other side so well that you can reproduce them to the others satisfaction; precision questioning helping others to clarify their arguments so they are not misunderstood; constructive confrontation: learn to disagree without being disagreeable; team management is like holding a dove in your hand: hold it too tight and you kill it, but hold it too loosely and you loose it
- Master the air-balancing bicycle
Learning requires doing, with good feedback that has no ambiguity whether you are succeeding
- Don’t treat commandments as commandments
Two cases will never exactly be the same - constant mindfulness
Chaos theory
From weather forecasting - even very small changes result in very different long-term results
Conscious thought is demanding:
Most people (also very smart people) aren’t very reflective –> we tend to go with strong hunches - if it feels true, “it is” - instead of going through all the evidence
Journalists trying to explain why the stock market rose - bias/problem:
We move too fast from “no idea why” to a conclusion
Often, the best evidence something is true is…
(failing to) figuring out why something is not
Example for how “experts/compelling stories” can even fool the best/most rigorous
Expert who investigated doctors’ lack of scientifical evidence (also in medicine in general) - a very rigorous person - still “accepted misdiagnosis” by an “expert oncologist” regarding cancer due to “compelling story”
