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Exploring Books on Decision-Making

Thinking, Fast and Slow

By Daniel Kahneman

From the Publisher:

Renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Daniel Kahneman takes readers on a groundbreaking tour of the mind by explaining the two systems that drive the way we think.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions, and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award—Book, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011.

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Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

By Annie Duke

From the Publisher:

From the bestselling author of Thinking in Bets comes a toolkit for mastering the skill of quitting to achieve greater success

Business leaders, with millions of dollars down the drain, struggle to abandon a new app or product that just isn’t working. Governments, caught in a hopeless conflict, believe that the next tactic will finally be the one that wins the war. And in our own lives, we persist in relationships or careers that no longer serve us. Why? According to Annie Duke, in the face of tough decisions, we’re terrible quitters. And that is significantly holding us back.

In Quit, Duke teaches you how to get good at quitting. Drawing on stories from elite athletes like Mount Everest climbers, founders of leading companies like Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and top entertainers like Dave Chappelle, Duke explains why quitting is integral to success, as well as strategies for determining when to hold em, and when to fold em, that will save you time, energy, and money. You’ll
How the paradox of quitting influences decision If you quit on time, you will feel you quit early
What forces work against good quitting behavior, such as escalation commitment, desire for certainty, and status quo bias
How to think in expected value in order to make better decisions, as well as other best practices, such as increasing flexibility in goal-setting, establishing “quitting contracts,” anticipating optionality, and conducting premortems and backcasts

Whether you’re facing a make-or-break business decision or life-altering personal choice, mastering the skill of quitting will help you make the best next move.

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Thinking in Bets

By Annie Duke

From the Publisher:

Annie Duke teaches how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result.

Even the best decision doesn’t yield the best outcome every time. There’s always an element of luck that you can’t control, and there is always information that is hidden from view. So the key to long-term success is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making?

Duke draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions.

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How to Decide

By Annie Duke

From the Publisher:

Making good decisions doesn’t have to be a series of endless guesswork. Rather, it’s a teachable skill that anyone can sharpen. In How to Decide, bestselling author and former professional poker player, Annie Duke, lays out a series of tools anyone can use to make better decisions.

You’ll learn:

  • To identify and dismantle hidden biases
  • To extract the highest quality feedback from those whose advice you seek
  • To more accurately identify the influence of luck in the outcome of your decisions
  • When to decide fast, when to decide slow, and when to decide in advance
  • To make decisions that more effectively help you to realize your goals and live your values

Through interactive exercises and thought experiments, this book helps you analyze key decisions you’ve made in the past and troubleshoot those you’re making in the future. Whether you’re picking investments, evaluating a job offer, or trying to figure out your romantic life, How to Decide can lead you to happier outcomes and fewer regrets.

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Superforecasting

By Phil Tetlock and Dan Garner

From the Publisher:

In Superforecasting, Phil Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner highlight decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament, The Good Judgment Project, which involved tens of thousands of ordinary people who set out to forecast global events. Some turned out to be astonishingly good, beating other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are “superforecasters.”

Tetlock and Gardner show how we can learn from this elite group, weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs). Interviews with a range of high-level decision makers from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course.

It offers a way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life.

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Thinking 101

By Woo-kyoung Ahn

From the Publisher:

Psychologist Woo-kyoung Ahn devised a course at Yale called “Thinking” to help students examine the biases that cause so many problems in their daily lives. It quickly became one of the university’s most popular courses. Now, for the first time, Ahn presents key insights from her years of teaching and research in a book for everyone.

She shows how “thinking problems” stand behind a wide range of challenges, from common, self-inflicted daily aggravations to our most pressing societal issues and inequities. Throughout, Ahn draws on decades of research from other cognitive psychologists, as well as from her own groundbreaking studies. And she presents it all in a compellingly readable style that uses fun examples from pop culture, anecdotes from her own life, and illuminating stories from history and the headlines.

Thinking 101 is a book that goes far beyond other books on thinking, showing how we can improve not just our own daily lives through better awareness of our biases but also the lives of everyone around us. It is, quite simply, required reading for everyone who wants to think―and live―better.

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The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't

By Julia Galef

From the Publisher:

A better way to combat knee-jerk biases and make smarter decisions, from Julia Galef, the acclaimed expert on rational decision-making.

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a “soldier” mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe—and shoot down those we don’t.

But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a “scout” mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout’s goal isn’t to defend one side over the other. It’s to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what’s actually true.

In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn’t that they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It’s a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world—which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.

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Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

By Adam Grant

From the Publisher:

Adam Grant examines the critical art of rethinking: learning to question your opinions and open other people’s minds.

Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.

The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become.

Adam Grant makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he’s right, but listen like he’s wrong. He investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. Think Again reveals that we don’t have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It’s an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.

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Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

By Chip and Dan Heath

From the Publisher:

Chip Heath and Dan Heath tackle the thorny problem of how to overcome our natural biases and irrational thinking to make better decisions about our work, lives, companies, and careers.

When it comes to decision-making, our brains are flawed instruments. But given that we are biologically hard-wired to act foolishly and behave irrationally at times, how can we do better? A number of books have identified how irrational our decision-making can be. But being aware of a bias doesn’t correct it, just as knowing that you are nearsighted doesn’t help you to see better. In Decisive, the Heath brothers offer specific, practical tools that can help us think more clearly about our options, and get out of our heads, to improve our decision-making at work and at home.

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You Are Not So Smart

By David McRaney

From the Publisher:

You Are Not So Smart reveals that every decision we make, every thought we contemplate, and every emotion we feel comes with a story we tell ourselves to explain them. But often these stories aren’t true.

Each short chapter covers topics such as Learned Helplessness, Selling Out, and the Illusion of Transparency.

You Are Not So Smart is a celebration of our irrational, thoroughly human behavior.

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