Thinking & Personal Effectiveness
Reasoning in probabilities rather than certainties.
9 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem
Eliezer Yudkowsky · 2003
Works a concrete mammography example in full to show that a positive test for a rare condition is usually a false positive, and argues that…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Words of Estimative Probability
Sherman Kent · 1964
Shows that vague verbal hedges like 'serious possibility' are read by different people as covering wildly different numeric ranges, and proposes a…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances
Thomas Bayes · 1763
Gives a rule for updating the probability of a cause given new evidence of its effect, the first mathematical statement of what is now called…
+7 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Works a concrete mammography example in full to show that a positive test for a rare condition is usually a false positive, and argues that visualising natural frequencies rather than manipulating the formula is what makes the result stick.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Philip Tetlock (The Long Now Foundation)
Argues from forecasting tournament results that accuracy comes from granular probability estimates, frequent updating and keeping score — trainable habits rather than expertise in the subject.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sherman Kent
Shows that vague verbal hedges like 'serious possibility' are read by different people as covering wildly different numeric ranges, and proposes a fixed scale of words tied to specific probability bands instead.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Pierre Wack
Recounts how Shell's planners abandoned single-line forecasts for a small set of internally consistent future scenarios, and credits scenario planning with getting Shell's managers to take the 1970s oil shocks seriously before they happened.
Bent Flyvbjerg
Applies Kahneman and Tversky's planning-fallacy research to argue that project forecasts should be built from the outcome distribution of a reference class of similar past projects, not from the details of the project at hand.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Divides forecasting problems into four quadrants by payoff structure and distribution type, and argues standard statistical tools fail specifically in the fourth quadrant, complex payoffs under fat-tailed uncertainty, where the rare event dominates the average.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sanjoy Mahajan
Teaches a small set of tools, dimensional analysis, easy cases, lumping, for getting a fast, defensible order-of-magnitude answer to a hard quantitative question without solving it exactly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Bayes
Gives a rule for updating the probability of a cause given new evidence of its effect, the first mathematical statement of what is now called Bayesian inference.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frank H. Knight
Distinguishes measurable risk, to which a known probability can be assigned, from true uncertainty, which cannot be reduced to odds at all, and argues that profit is the reward specifically for bearing the second kind.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frank P. Ramsey
Defines a person's degree of belief as the odds at which they would accept a bet on it, grounding subjective probability in observable choices rather than in frequencies or a prior notion of chance.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky
Argues that forecasters should set aside the specific details of a case, the inside view, and instead anchor on the outcome distribution of a class of similar cases, the outside view, because the inside view systematically produces overconfident forecasts.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Sarah Lichtenstein & Baruch Fischhoff
Finds that immediate feedback on whether stated confidence matched outcomes improved calibration substantially within a single training session, while feedback without the outcome comparison did not.
This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.