Thinking & Personal Effectiveness
Choosing well under uncertainty and time pressure.
11 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen
Frédéric Bastiat · 1850
Argues that most error in judging a decision or a policy comes from weighing only its immediate, visible effect and ignoring the less visible effects…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Pensées
Blaise Pascal · 1670
Argues that believing in God is the rational wager even under total uncertainty, because the expected loss from wrongly believing is finite while the…
+7 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk
Daniel Bernoulli · 1738
Argues that a gain's value to a person diminishes with existing wealth, so it is expected utility rather than expected monetary value that a rational…
+2 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Frédéric Bastiat
Argues that most error in judging a decision or a policy comes from weighing only its immediate, visible effect and ignoring the less visible effects it prevents or displaces elsewhere.
about 4 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel Kahneman (Talks at Google)
Kahneman sets out the two-system account of judgement and the biases it predicts; note that several priming results he cites have since failed to replicate, a limitation he later acknowledged in print.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jeff Bezos
Argues that most decisions are reversible two-way doors that should be made fast by small groups, and that treating them with the caution due to genuinely irreversible one-way door decisions slows an organisation down for no benefit.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bina Venkataraman (The Long Now Foundation)
Argues that short-termism is a design failure of institutions and incentives rather than a defect of human character, and that foresight can be built into how decisions are structured.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Blaise Pascal
Argues that believing in God is the rational wager even under total uncertainty, because the expected loss from wrongly believing is finite while the expected loss from wrongly disbelieving is infinite.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John F. Magee
Introduces the decision tree as a way to lay out a sequence of choices and chance events explicitly, so a manager can see which uncertainties actually drive the expected value of a decision rather than guessing.
Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman
Shows that people predict outcomes by how well a description matches a stereotype rather than by the base rate of that outcome, so a vivid personality sketch overrides known statistical frequencies.
Gary Klein, Roberta Calderwood & Anne Clinton-Cirocco
Finds that experienced fire commanders rarely compare options at all under time pressure, but recognise a situation as a familiar pattern and act on the first workable response it suggests.
Avinash K. Dixit
Shows that even a small cost of reversing an investment gives waiting real value, so a decision-maker rationally holds off committing until the case for acting is much stronger than a plain net-present-value rule would demand.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Army
Sets out a structured method for reviewing a completed action against its intended outcome, what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, and why it differed, as an open discussion rather than a graded critique.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul J. Ferraro & Laura O. Taylor
Finds in a survey of professional economists that most fail to recognise a textbook opportunity-cost problem when it is dressed in unfamiliar language, suggesting the concept is taught better than it is actually used.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gary Klein
Proposes that before a plan launches, the team should imagine it has already failed and write down why, because prospective hindsight surfaces risks that asking what could go wrong directly does not.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.