Coaching practices for Selection Bias Decisions

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Selection Bias Decisions, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I’m sure about my read on this, but I only ever notice the things that confirm what I already think
• I’m weighing a dozen factors on the same choice I face over and over, and they all blur together
• I’ve decided the lesson from this success is “focus narrow” or “go big”
• A choice I made blew up and I’m tearing into myself
• I sit down to choose and realize I never decided what I actually want first, so whatever options get put in front of me end up defining "good" for me

Practices that may help

1. Survivorship Bias: Learning from What You Can’t See
   Survivorship bias is the error of drawing conclusions only from the cases that made it through a filter — winners, survivors, visible successes — while the failures that never appear are silently excluded. The clearest historical example is Abraham Wald’s WWII aircraft study: the military wanted to armor the bullet holes they saw on returning planes; Wald showed they should armor where they saw no damage, because planes hit there didn’t return.
2. Notice which data you selected — and which you ignored
   Your conclusions are built on a sample of the available data — ask what the sample excluded.
   The Ladder of Inference
3. Use "take the best": choose on your single most informative cue
   When choosing between options, identify the most diagnostic cue and use it — stop searching for more.
   Simple Heuristics: Gerd Gigerenzer’s Case for Fast and Frugal Thinking
4. Steelman the strategy opposite to the successful one
   Before adopting a lesson from a success story, build the best possible case for the opposite approach.
   Survivorship Bias: Learning from What You Can’t See
5. Evaluate decisions by process, not outcome
   Judge a decision by the quality of the reasoning at the time, not by what happened.
   Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect
6. Evaluate each option against your criteria before comparing options to each other
   Score options independently first — so the comparison set can’t retroactively redefine what good looks like.
   The Decoy Effect — How an Irrelevant Option Changes Your Choice
7. Audit person-judgments for prototype substitution
   Check whether a judgment about a person is based on their actual behavior or on resemblance to a type.
   The Representativeness Heuristic — Judging by Resemblance
8. Choose the right reference class for any prediction
   Find the statistical base rate for the category your decision belongs to — not just the inspiring examples.
   Survivorship Bias: Learning from What You Can’t See
9. For many decisions, going with your gut outperforms lengthy analysis
   Over-explaining reasons for a preference can actually detgrade the quality of affective predictions.
   Affect Forecasting: Why You Mispredicted How You’d Feel
10. Commit and stop re-evaluating
    Once you’ve chosen, close the door instead of reopening the comparison.
    Satisficing vs. Maximizing: When “Good Enough” Wins

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