Common Causes of Very Bad Decisions

Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong

It is bad when people who are consistently egregiously wrong become deferred to on everything

The mistake we all make... and the simple experiment that reveals it

Your answer reveals how you see the world – and the common error that hampers our decision making. In an extract from his new book, psychologist Richard Nisbett reveals the ‘mindware’ to help us think smarter

People Spend Too Much Time On Decisions with Equally Satisfying Outcomes

The pitfalls of analysis paralysis

A philosopher’s 350-year-old trick to get people to change their minds is now backed up by psychologists

The 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal is perhaps best known for Pascal’s Wager which, in the first formal use of decision theory, argued that believing in God is the most pragmatic decision. But it seems the French thinker also had a knack for psychology. As Brain Pickings points out, Pascal set out the most effective way to get someone to change their mind, centuries before experimental psychologists began to formally study persuasion:

Why major life decisions should be approached with ‘epistemic humility’ | Psyche Videos

At a crossroads in life? No matter how much you deliberate, one unknowable remains: the person you will be on the other side

AI May Be Atrophying Our Brains, Professor Warns

AI may soon ruin our ability to make decisions for ourselves — an outcome that would be, one expert warns, "catastrophic."

Epistemic Vigilance

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remain...

Self-Distancing: What It Is and How You Can Use It to Make Better Decisions – Effectiviology

It’s hard to set your emotions aside when you’re faced with a difficult decision. This is problematic, since our emotions often cause us to make the wrong decision in important areas of life, including in our relationships, our finances, and our health.

Listen to Your Community, But Don’t Let Them Tell You What to Do

You know how interviewers love asking about your greatest weakness, or the biggest mistake you’ve ever made? These questions may sound formulaic, maybe even borderline cliché, but be careful when you answer: they are more important than they seem. So when people ask me what our biggest mistake was

The Biggest Mistake I See Engineers Make

Throughout my career, the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others.   I’ve experienced this mistake as both an IC and a manager. As an IC, it’s a mistake I made many, many times early in my ow...

Algorithmic personalization of information can cause inaccurate generalization and overconfidence.

Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.

Michael Baym on Twitter / X

Remember that you, by definition, cannot distinguish between a good idea and a failure of your own knowledge, judgement, or taste. This is why external (ideally expert) feedback is crucial— Michael Baym (@baym) March 25, 2026

Metacognitive Myopia: A Major Obstacle on the Way to Rationality

The notion of metacognitive myopia refers to a conspicuous weakness of the quality control of memory and reasoning processes. Although people are often remarkably sensitive even to complex samples of information when making evaluative judgments and decisions, their uncritical and naive tendency to take the validity of sampled information for granted constitutes a major obstacle to rational behavior. After illustrating this phenomenon with reference to prominent biases (base-rate neglect, misattribution, perseverance), we decompose metacognitive myopia into two distinct but intertwined functions, monitoring and control. We offer explanations for why effectively monitoring the biases resulting from information sampling in an uncertain world is so difficult and why the control function is severely restricted by the lack of volitional control over mental actions. Because of these and other difficulties, metacognitive myopia constitutes a major obstacle to rational judgment and decision making.

People Reject Algorithms in Uncertain Decision Domains Because They Have Diminishing Sensitivity to Forecasting Error

Will people use self-driving cars, virtual doctors, and other algorithmic decision-makers if they outperform humans? The answer depends on the uncertainty inherent in the decision domain. We propose that people have diminishing sensitivity to forecasting error and that this preference results in people favoring riskier (and often worse-performing) decision-making methods, such as human judgment, in inherently uncertain domains. In nine studies ( N = 4,820), we found that (a) people have diminishing sensitivity to each marginal unit of error that a forecast produces, (b) people are less likely to use the best possible algorithm in decision domains that are more unpredictable, (c) people choose between decision-making methods on the basis of the perceived likelihood of those methods producing a near-perfect answer, and (d) people prefer methods that exhibit higher variance in performance (all else being equal). To the extent that investing, medical decision-making, and other domains are inherently uncertain, people may be unwilling to use even the best possible algorithm in those domains.