The Base Rate Blindspot: Why You Keep Ignoring the Most Useful Number in the Room
Base rates tell you what usually happens before your situation adds any complexity. Here's why smart people systematically ignore them and how to stop.
M. Linden Topic
decision-making
17 posts tagged decision-making from Confronting Unknowns.
M. Linden More on decision-making
The Dead Reckoning Problem: How to Make Good Decisions Without a Fixed Reference Point
Dead reckoning reveals how skilled navigators make confident decisions without GPS. Here's what that means for decisions made in uncertain, shifting conditions.
M. LindenScenario Planning Without the Crystal Ball: How to Think in Multiple Futures
Scenario planning isn't about predicting the future. It's about building decisions that hold up across several plausible ones. Here's how to do it right.
M. LindenThe Overfitting Problem: Why Your Hard-Won Experience Can Become a Liability
Learn how cognitive overfitting causes experts to over-apply lessons from past situations to new ones, and how to avoid this hidden decision-making trap.
M. LindenThe Sunk Cost Fallacy's Dangerous Cousin: Escalation of Commitment in High-Stakes Decisions
Escalation of commitment goes beyond sunk cost bias. Learn how organizations trap themselves in failing courses of action and how to break the cycle.
M. LindenThe Reversibility Trap: Why You're Treating Every Decision Like It's Permanent
Most decisions aren't as permanent as they feel. Learn how misclassifying reversible choices as irreversible leads to costly delays and analysis paralysis.
M. LindenThe Cobra Effect: When Your Solution Becomes the Problem
The Cobra Effect explains how well-intentioned interventions backfire in complex systems, and how to spot the trap before you spring it.
M. LindenThe Illusion of Control: Why Tightening Your Grip on Uncertainty Makes Things Worse
The instinct to impose control during uncertainty often backfires. Here's why loosening your grip leads to better decisions.
M. LindenThe Weight of Weak Signals: How to Detect Early Warning Signs Before They Become Crises
Weak signals are easy to dismiss, until they aren't. Learn how to detect early warning signs in complex systems before they cascade into crises.
M. LindenThe Reference Class Problem: Why You're Comparing Your Situation to the Wrong Precedents
When you estimate odds by drawing on past examples, choosing the wrong comparison group can be more dangerous than having no data at all.
M. LindenThe Signal and the Silence: How to Make Decisions When Data Is Sparse
When evidence is thin and stakes are high, most decision tools break down. Here's how to reason carefully through data-sparse environments.
M. LindenNegative Space Thinking: What the Absence of Information Tells You
Learn how to read missing data, silent signals, and conspicuous gaps as decision-making inputs, not just noise to ignore.
M. LindenBayesian Thinking for Non-Statisticians: How to Update Beliefs Without Losing Your Mind
Bayesian reasoning is one of the most useful tools for making decisions under uncertainty, and you don't need a statistics degree to use it.
M. LindenThe Dunning-Kruger Effect in High-Stakes Decisions: Why Overconfident Leaders Fail
How cognitive overconfidence creates blind spots in leadership decisions and practical strategies to counter this bias.
M. LindenSatisficing vs. Optimizing: Why Perfect Decisions Don't Exist
Herbert Simon's satisficing principle explains why good enough beats perfect in complex, uncertain environments.
M. LindenKlein's Recognition-Primed Decision Model and Why Experts Don't Deliberate
Gary Klein's research on naturalistic decision-making upended the classical model of rational choice. Experts don't weigh options. They recognize patterns and act.
M. LindenThe Difference Between Complicated and Complex (And Why It Matters)
A jet engine is complicated. A rainforest is complex. The distinction is not semantic. Confusing the two leads to catastrophically wrong interventions.
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