decision-making

Judge a decision by the distribution of outcomes it could have produced, not the one that happened to occur.#alternative-histories

The emotional brain receives the signal first and can commandeer behaviour before the thinking brain has the facts.#amygdala-hijack

Combine extreme safety with extreme risk and refuse the middle: floor the downside absolutely, leave the upside open.#barbell-strategy

Weight opinions by believability — track records, not titles, decide whose view counts on a given question.#believability-weighted

Don't rely on in-the-moment willpower — build environments and rules that make the good decision the automatic one.#build-guardrails

Know where the edge of your knowledge is — the boundary matters far more than the size of the circle.#circle-of-competence

Most decisions are made by defaults, not by choice — the work is converting automatic reactions into deliberate ones.#default-not-choice

When the reference class does not exist yet, ask which outcome is the default and what would have to change to get another.#default-vs-what-must-change

Ego, emotion, social pressure, and inertia hijack a decision before reasoning ever starts.#enemies-of-reason

Quality is a requirement you negotiate with the user, not an absolute you chase.#good-enough-software

Never ask what someone thinks — ask what they are paid to think.#incentives-explain-behavior

Solve for what would guarantee failure and refuse to do that, instead of solving directly for success.#invert-always-invert

An investment promises safety of principal and an adequate return after thorough analysis; everything else is speculation wearing a suit.#investment-vs-speculation

A fully optimised life cannot accommodate luck — unallocated time and money are what let you say yes.#keep-slack

Hold a latticework of models from many disciplines — a single-discipline mind bends every problem to fit its one tool.#latticework-of-models

Biases don't add, they multiply — several small pressures acting together produce outcomes none would produce alone.#lollapalooza-effect

Luck is not a random draw but a function of how much contact you maintain with the space where opportunity moves.#luck-surface-area

Buy far enough below your estimate of value that being materially wrong about the estimate still leaves you whole.#margin-of-safety

Probability theory works on repeatable events; the decisions that matter most are usually one-offs it was never built for.#measurable-vs-unknowable

The market is a manic partner quoting you a price daily — you are never obliged to trade, only to decide whether the quote is useful.#mr-market

Don't take advice from someone who bears none of the cost of being wrong.#no-opinion-without-exposure

Everyone's money decisions make sense given the era and cohort that formed them — 'irrational' usually means 'calibrated on a different sample'.#nobody-is-crazy

Optionality pays when you do not need to be right — many cheap tries, each with a capped loss and an open upside.#optionality

You cannot identify the attempts that will matter without making the ones that will not.#paradox-of-discovery

Play long-term games with long-term people — compounding of money, trust, and knowledge only works if you don't reset the board.#play-long-games

Write recurring decisions down as principles — a decision made once and codified stops costing willpower and starts compounding.#principles-as-code

Aim for reasonable rather than rational — a slightly suboptimal plan you will actually stick with beats an optimal one you abandon.#reasonable-over-rational

Evolutionarily stable strategies explain behaviour with no planner — equilibria emerge from payoffs alone.#stable-strategies

Investing success is a matter of temperament rather than IQ — the binding constraint is behavioural, not analytical.#temperament-over-intellect

Between stimulus and response there is a space, and skill is widening it enough to step into on purpose.#the-space

Build a thin end-to-end path first and aim from real feedback, rather than specifying the whole system in advance.#tracer-bullets

Given enough participants, spectacular track records appear by chance alone — success is evidence of skill only after you count the entrants.#track-records-are-noisy

Improvement usually comes from removal — subtract the harmful before adding the helpful.#via-negativa