Choosing your Choice Architect(ure)
“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.” — Samuel Johnson *** In the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein they coin the terms ‘Choice …
Status Quo Bias
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 …
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 …
The Default Choice, So Hard to Resist
The Web offers choice and competition that is only one click away. But in practice, the power of defaults often matters most. This article in the NYT flags some interesting points on technological …
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 …
Future Babble: Why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway
Future Babble has come out to mixed reviews. I think the book would interest anyone seeking wisdom. Here are some of my notes: First a little background: Predictions fail because the world is too …
The Art and Science of High-Stakes Decisions
How can anyone make rational decisions in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often unattainable? Some decisions are more difficult than others. Yet we’re often …