Elon Musk on Regulators
The Federal Aviation Administration had a meeting with Elon Musk they won’t forget. Musk met with them to discuss some approvals for the work one of his companies, SpaceX, was doing. The meeting …
Loss aversion
Confidence and Validity
Santa Fe Institute Board of Trustees Chair Michael Mauboussin interviewed Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. The wide-ranging conversation talks about disciplined intuition, causality, base rates, …
Focusing Illusions
My favorite chapter in the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher is called ‘Decisions: Focusing Illusions.’ It’s a really great summary of how focusing on the wrong things …
Blindness to the Benefits of Ambiguity
“Decision makers,” write Stefan Trautmann and Richard Zeckhauser in their paper Blindness to the Benefits of Ambiguity, “often prove to be blind to the learning opportunities offered …
Why Do People Choke When the Stakes Are High?
Loss Aversion. In sports, on a game show, or just on the job, what causes people to choke when the stakes are high? A new study by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) …
Making Good Citizenship Fun — Richard Thaler
Interesting article by Richard Thaler on encouraging good citizenship by making the desired behavior more fun: Lotteries are just one way to provide positive reinforcement. Their power comes from the …
Daniel Kahneman: Some Thoughts on Thinking
While Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, gets all the attention, he’s also written a few articles that might catch your interest on thinking better. Optimistic Bias: In …
Choice Under Uncertainty
We use heuristics – rules of thumb – to make judgments. These can lead to certain predictable biases. These can lead to certain predictable biases. For instance, we classify situations …