When we set goals—both personal and professional—we tend to focus on what we should do, rather than focussing on what we should avoid. Humans naturally know more about what is wrong, what is bad, what is harmful, or what won’t work, more than they know about what is right and what would work.
The Anatomy of a Bad Idea
Bad ideas can share several features: They take a complex problem and apply a one-shot solution: the silver bullet that ignores the root cause. They are easy to understand, and don’t require …
Distinction Bias: Why You Make Terrible Life Choices
Worried about a cognitive bias like confirmation bias or hyperbolic discounting screwing you up? Watch out for distinction bias.
Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Thinking
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
Common Causes of Very Bad Decisions
Italian psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini was once asked why people keep making the same mistakes.
Mindful Judgment and Decision Making
A full range of psychological processes has been put into play to explain judgment and choice phenomena. Complementing work on attention, information integration, and learning, decision research over the past 10 years has also examined the effects of goals, mental representation, and memory processes. In addition to deliberative processes, automatic processes have gotten closer attention, and the emotions revolution has put affective processes on a footing equal to cognitive ones. Psychological process models provide natural predictions about individual differences and lifespan changes and integrate across judgment and decision making (JDM) phenomena. “Mindful” JDM research leverages our knowledge about psychological processes into causal explanations for important judgment and choice regularities, emphasizing the adaptive use of an abundance of processing alternatives. Such explanations supplement and support existing mathematical descriptions of phenomena such as loss aversion or hyperbolic discounting. Unlike such descriptions, they also provide entry points for interventions designed to help people overcome judgments or choices considered undesirable.
People Spend Too Much Time On Decisions with Equally Satisfying Outcomes
The pitfalls of analysis paralysis
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.
Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them
Even when you try to do good, you can end up doing accidental harm. But there are ways you can minimise the risks.
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.
How To Think Real Good | Meta-rationality
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
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
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.
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
The natural selection of bad science
Abstract. Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, sugg
How to take things less personally and avoid mind reading | Psyche Guides
Always blaming yourself or assuming others think ill of you? A CBT therapist shares ways to break these self-critical habits
Cognitive Bias Lab | Learn to Make Better Decisions
Explore cognitive biases with interactive tests, simulations, and real-world examples. Free platform to sharpen decision-making and critical thinking — no sign-up needed.
