Quotes About Judgment

Determining whether a decision is good or bad means examining the quality of the beliefs informing the decision, the available options, and how the future might turn out given any choice you make.

To figure out whether a decision is good or bad, you need to know not just the things that might reasonably happen and what could be gained or lost, but also the likelihood of each possibility unfolding. That means, to become a better decision-maker, you need to be willing to estimate those probabilities.

There's a name for this: Resulting. When people result, they look at whether the result was good or bad to figure out if the decision was good or bad. (Psychologists

Here's a secret: All guesses are educated guesses because there is almost no estimate you could make about which you literally know nothing.

The quality of the outcome casts a shadow over our ability to see the quality of the decision.

We want outcome quality to align with decision quality.

The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is. But it doesn't determine which of that set of outcomes will actually happen.

Most decisions have a mix of upside and downside potentials. When figuring out whether a decision is good or bad, you are essentially asking if the upside potential compensates for the risk of the downside.

The actual outcome casts a shadow over your ability to remember what you knew at the time of the decision.

We are all trying to defend ourselves against how we imagine other people are going to judge us.

Kill criteria could consist of information you learn that tells you the monkey isn't trainable or that you're not sufficiently likely to reach your goal, or signs that luck has gone against you.

We are much more concerned with errors of commission than errors of omission (failures to act). We're more wary of "causing" a bad outcome by acting than "letting it happen" through inaction.

information. We

And pros are just better at that choice, playing a mere 15% to 25% of the two-card starting combinations they are dealt in Texas Hold'em. Compare that to an amateur, who will stick with their starting cards over half the time.

Look how quickly you can begin to redefine what it means to be wrong. Once we start thinking like this, it becomes easier to resist the temptation to make snap judgments after results or say things like "I knew it" or "I should have known." Better decision-making and more self-compassion follow.

This phenomenon is known as omission-commission bias.

The corollary of this is also true. When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.

This phenomenon is called the better-than-average effect.

The outside view disciplines the distortions that live in the inside view. That's why it's important to start with the outside view and anchor there, considering things like what's true of the world in general or the way someone else would view your situation.

Accountability, like reinforcement of accuracy, also improves our decision-making and information processing when we are away from the group because we know in advance that we will have to answer to the group for our decisions.

Because any decision determines only the set of possible outcomes (some good, some bad, some in between), this means good outcomes can result from both good and bad decisions, and bad outcomes can result from both good and bad decisions.

Resulting makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others.

Hindsight bias, like resulting, makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others.

Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe that an outcome, after it occurs, was predictable or inevitable.