Date:
January 24, 2025
Thinking slow fast — how to combine reasoned and intuitive thinking in practical ways to arrive at high quality decisions. This chapter of “The Playbook” (or “Just One” as my book might eventually be named) presents my best practices for effective decision making, such as minimizing the risk of a total loss, the coin toss, always saying yes, Just-Say-No, the non-pros-cons list, pre mortems, the trust-no-one imperative, and the art of indefinite postponement.
Why and how intuitive decision making works
The Master And His Emissary: the right side hemisphere of the brain (RBH) tells you what the right decision is. Left brain tries to make a linear, logical decision based on pros and cons (that really don’t mean anything without RBH context). RBH only supplies the story to the LBH for it to have something of a narrative to pretend to understand, and to dig deeper into details of respective item, then it hands it all back to the RBH which then knows which argument is THE important one. Don’t let your LBH kidnap the decision!
The decision quality illusion
An acquaintance sets you up on a blind date. It turns out to be the love of your life. Was going on the date a good quality decision?
Probably not. Going on a blind date set up by somebody who hardly knows you is much more likely to lead to a complete waste of time. On the other hand, it completely depends on your particular constraints regarding time, money, friends and “game[ How good you are with the initial attraction of a potential partner]”
If you lend someone $20
and never see that person again,
it was probably well worth it
You bet hard on a poker hand with a 98 per cent win chance. You lose. Was it a bad quality decision?
Nope! It was just bad luck, that the 2 per cent probability of losing happened to manifest itself in this universe. The outcome of a decision has very little to do with the quality of the decision, since more things can happen than actually do happen. Sometimes the unlikely happen, no matter the quality of the decision process. Adverse outcomes that only have 1% probability of happening still occur around 1% of the time.
