Tag: thinking
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An Index of Cognitive Biases (Understanding (and Overcoming) Mental Shortcuts)
I’ve shared lists of cognitive biases before, and books and blog posts on the topic are everywhere. To me, this stuff is like catnip. While doing further research into cognitive-debiasing training (inspired by Philip Tetlock’s research on forecasting), I stumbled across an extensive index of over 100 cognitive biases from The Decision Lab. The biases…
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Four Steps to Better Predictions
Following his work on geopolitical forecasting, Philip Tetlock co-founded The Good Judgement Project, along with decision scientist Barbara Mellers and UPenn colleague Don Moore. Their further research identified four key steps to improving forecast accuracy, shared on the (now archived) ‘Science’ section of the project’s site. These steps: And don’t forget the ten commandments of…
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Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Prediction
In reviewing Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment upon its release in 2005, The New Yorker of course discussed the main finding that expert judgements are not much better than those of lay forecasters. Another key focus of the review was Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, a metaphor drawn from Archilochus sometime in the…
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The Two Fundamental Truths of Prediction
There are two fundamental truths of prediction: (i) there exists a “prediction horizon” where predictions beyond this point are inherently inaccurate; and (ii) experts are generally just bad at predicting. On that first point: our ability to predict is limited by the nature of complex systems. Weather forecasts, for example, are quite accurate a day…
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Long-Term Thinking and Climate Change
One of the reasons the general public are slow in acting on climate change in the manner the situation’s importance demands is our reluctance to think too far beyond our immediate time horizon. However this shouldn’t stop us. That is the suggestion of Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who extols the virtues of long-term thinking more eloquently than…
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Epiphanies Through Daydreams
Research aimed at discovering how ‘Eureka moments’ are triggered and how these moments of clarity and insight differ from typical methodical reasoning has found that not only are epiphanies more likely when we’re daydreaming, but our state of mind before we tackle a problem is also crucial. They materialize without warning, often through an unconscious…