• Pre-decisions
  • have you tried telling yourself a story that will give you permission to solve the problem?
  • Is a series of tools and frameworks and we operate as carpenter’s with only a hammer
  • it’s worth reiterating that the point of the cognitive bias literature isn’t to tell you that people aren’t fully rational but to catalog and model the various ways in which they predictably aren’t
• Decisions
  • We’re unintentionally stupid
    • biased
    • incomplete information
    • tired
    • managing your psychology is basically THE HARD PROBLEM in LIFE
  • An exhaustive evaluation is generally prohibitive so we apply heuristics, there is a spectrum of decisions, where to grab a sandwich vs who to marry,
    • if a decision is transient, inexpensive, or easy to reverse, it may be fine to apply a less rigorous process.
    • but decisions can be cumulative
  • Chesterton’s Fence - A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
  • how you approach problems, and how you identify the information that matters and ignore what doesn’t.
  • Hard decisions are hard because there is no best option, this will always be true. If there was an best option it can be complicated but it wouldn’t a hard decision.
  • The OODA Loop
• Unintended Consequences
  • ex Dating - dark triad men mistreat women, who then mistreat ordinary men, who then mistreat ordinary women, bad behaviour drives out the good
  • Information hazards are risks that arise from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of true information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm. Such hazards are often subtler than direct physical threats, and, as a consequence, are easily overlooked. They can, however, be important. This paper surveys the terrain and proposes a taxonomy.
• Ways of Knowing
  • Propositional - knowing that something is true. This kind of knowing is closely tied to language and justification
    • Result: Beliefs (are they true?)
    • Memory: Semantic
    • Standard:
  • Procedural - knowing how to do something. This can be very complicated, like knowing how to complete surgery or something simple like tying one’s shoe.
    • Result: Skills (are they effective?)
    • Memory: Procedural
    • Standard: Power
  • Perspective - knowing via embodied perception. It consists of seeing the world and one’s place in it via a specific point of view, and understanding (or not) the key aspects of a situation. Salience landscaping for situational awareness to get optimal grip so that you can act in it well
    • Result: States (of mind)
    • Memory: Episodic (chunk of memory, this is what I was experiencing in it)
    • Standard: Presence
  • Participatory - knowing how to act in the “agent-arena” environment. It is simultaneously one of the most basic and most profound kinds of knowing. One way to think about participatory knowledge is to consider the difference between being in a state of confusion versus a state of flow. Flow is when you are in a groove and feel a natural “dance” between your actions and the environment, and an example of participatory knowledge. The collection of identities you assume/assign. ‘Affordances’ that couple you to the environment (on multiple levels). This is the agent-arena
    • Memory: Self (the stories you’ve stored about yourself)
    • Result: Affordances (walking isn’t something in the floor or you)
    • Standard: Belonging