Thinking & Decisions

Evidence-based thinking & decisions practices.

54 concepts in this area — each broken into concrete practices with the real mechanism, an honest read on the evidence, and how to practice it with IX Coach.

• Ambiguity Aversion — Why Unknown Odds Feel Worse Than Bad Odds — Why do people prefer risky options with known probabilities over uncertain options with unknown probabilities?
• Attribute Substitution: When Your Brain Answers a Different Question — What is attribute substitution, and how do you catch your brain swapping a hard question for an easy one?
• Availability Cascades: How Fears Spread and Inflate — What is an availability cascade, and how do you protect your judgments from socially amplified fears?
• Base-Rate Neglect: Why We Ignore the Odds — What is base-rate neglect, and how do you correct it in everyday decisions?
• Bayesian Thinking: How to Update Beliefs Rationally — What is Bayesian thinking, and how do you use it to make better decisions?
• Calibration Training — How do you train yourself to have well-calibrated confidence — neither overconfident nor underconfident?
• Choice Overload, Made Practical — How does too much choice make decisions harder and what can you do about it?
• Circle of Competence — What is the circle of competence and how do you use it to make better decisions?
• Confirmation Bias: Seeing What You Expect to See — What is confirmation bias, and what actually works to reduce it?
• Decision Journaling: Learning to Decide Better Over Time — What is decision journaling and how does it improve decision quality?
• Expected Value Thinking: Deciding Under Uncertainty — How do you use expected value thinking to make better decisions under uncertainty?
• Fermi Estimation — What is Fermi estimation and how does it help you make better quantitative judgments?
• Hanlon's Razor: Never Attribute to Malice What Stupidity Can Explain — What is Hanlon's Razor and how does it improve decisions and relationships?
• Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect — What is hindsight bias and how does it distort learning from experience?
• Hyperbolic Discounting — Why Future You Always Gets the Short End — Why do people prefer smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed ones, even when the delay makes no rational sense?
• Inversion: Solve Problems Backward — What is inversion thinking, and how do you use it to make better decisions?
• Leverage Points — What are leverage points in a system and how do you find them?
• Margin of Safety — What is margin of safety and how does it apply beyond investing?
• Mental Models: Charlie Munger’s Latticework Approach — What is Charlie Munger’s latticework of mental models, and how do you build one?
• Occam’s Razor: Prefer the Simpler Explanation — What is Occam’s Razor and how does it improve thinking and decisions?
• Omission Bias — Why Doing Nothing Feels Safer Than Acting — Why do people judge harmful inactions as more acceptable than equally harmful actions?
• Opportunity Cost Thinking: What You Give Up When You Choose — What is opportunity cost, and how do you actually use it to make better decisions?
• Recognition-Primed Decision Making — How do experts make fast, high-quality decisions without comparing options?
• Red Teaming: Stress-Testing Plans Before They Fail — What is red teaming and how do you use it to find flaws in your own plans?
• Reference Class Forecasting — How do you make more accurate forecasts by using base rates instead of inside-view thinking?
• Satisficing vs. Maximizing: When “Good Enough” Wins — What is satisficing vs maximizing, and which leads to better decisions?
• Scope Insensitivity: Why Scale Doesn’t Change Your Feelings — What is scope insensitivity, and how do you make decisions that are actually proportional to real-world scale?
• Second-Order Thinking: And Then What? — What is second-order thinking, and how does it lead to better decisions?
• Status Quo Bias — Why We Stick with the Default — Why do people prefer the current state of affairs even when changing would benefit them?
• Stocks and Flows — What are stocks and flows in systems thinking and why do they matter?
• Superforecasting — How do superforecasters make more accurate predictions than experts?
• Survivorship Bias: Learning from What You Can’t See — What is survivorship bias and how does it distort decisions?
• Systems Thinking — What is systems thinking and how do you apply it to real problems?
• The 10-10-10 Rule — What is the 10-10-10 rule and how does it help you make better decisions?
• The Affect Heuristic — When Feelings Substitute for Facts — What is the affect heuristic and how does it distort risk and benefit judgments?
• The Availability Heuristic: Why Memorable Feels Probable — What is the availability heuristic, and how does it distort your sense of risk and frequency?
• The Conjunction Fallacy — When "More Details" Feels More Likely — Why do people rate a detailed scenario as more probable than a simpler one that contains it?
• The Decoy Effect — How an Irrelevant Option Changes Your Choice — What is the decoy effect and how does adding a third option change which of two choices people prefer?
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect, Understood Clearly — What is the Dunning-Kruger effect and what does the research actually show?
• The Eisenhower Matrix for Teams — How do you use the Eisenhower Matrix with a team to align on priorities?
• The Ladder of Inference — What is the ladder of inference and how does it help you reason more carefully?
• The Ludic Fallacy: When You Mistake Real Life for a Game — What is the ludic fallacy, and how do you stop using controlled-game logic in unpredictable real-world situations?
• The Map Is Not the Territory — What does "the map is not the territory" mean and how does it improve thinking?
• The Narrative Fallacy: Why We Can’t Stop Making Stories — What is the narrative fallacy, and how do you make decisions that aren’t distorted by compelling stories?
• The Outside View — What is the outside view and how does it help you make better predictions and plans?
• The Peak-End Rule — How Memory Distorts Experience — What is the peak-end rule and how does it affect what we remember about experiences?
• The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong — Why do people consistently underestimate how long tasks will take, and how can you correct it?
• The Pre-Mortem: Imagine It Already Failed — What is a pre-mortem, and how does imagining failure improve a plan?
• The Regret-Minimization Framework — What is Jeff Bezos’s regret-minimization framework, and how do you use it to decide?
• The Representativeness Heuristic — Judging by Resemblance — What is the representativeness heuristic and when does it lead judgment astray?
• The Sunk Cost Fallacy: Escaping Bad Investments — What is the sunk cost fallacy, and how do you stop letting past investments trap future decisions?
• The Two-Way Door — What is Bezos’s two-way door principle and how does it speed up decisions?
• Thinking in Bets — What is thinking in bets and how does it improve decision making?
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, Made Usable — What is System 1 vs System 2 thinking, and how do you use it to decide better?