The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See
In The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See, Harvard Professor Max Bazerman, opines about how the failure to notice things leads to “poor personal decisions, organizational crises, and …
Richard Zeckhauser
Antigone: Better Decisions Through Literature
I recently picked up Sophocles’s Antigone. Sophocles wrote more than 100 plays in his lifetime, but only seven complete tragedies remain. In Antigone, Polynices, son of Oedipus, went to war with …
Avoiding Ignorance
This is a continuation of two types of ignorance. You can’t deal with ignorance if you can’t recognize its presence. If you’re suffering from primary ignorance, it means you probably …
The Two Types of Ignorance
The first category of ignorance is when we do not know we are ignorant. This is primary ignorance. The second category of ignorance is when we recognize our ignorance. *** This article builds on …
Decisions Under Uncertainty
If you’re a knowledge worker you make decisions every day. In fact, whether you realize it or not, decisions are your job. Decisions are how you make a living. Of course, not every decision is …
The Scroll of the Scribes
King Solomon, thought by some to be the wisest man who ever lived, anticipated the economists concept of separating equilibria by about 3,000 years. In his most famous case, he proposed cutting a baby …
Richard Zeckhauser on Making Better Decisions
Richard Zeckhauser, aka Mr. Probability, is a champion Bridge player and the Frank Ramsey professor of political economy at Harvard University. Speaking about Zeckhauser, Charlie Munger, the brilliant …
The Half-life of Facts
Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades we were convinced that …
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 …
Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
“The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and …