How to Decide

Accuracy lives in the intersection of the outside view and the inside view.

Marrying the outside and inside view gives you a clearer view of yourself, how you ended up where you are, and what the future might hold for you. That will improve the quality of what you learn from the past and the quality of the decisions you make going forward.

being smart makes you better at motivated reasoning, the tendency to reason about information to confirm your prior beliefs and arrive at the conclusion you desire. And just to be clear, in this case “better” is not a good thing.

Smart people often think more highly of their beliefs and opinions. They are less likely to think the stuff they know needs correcting

A base rate gives you a place to start when you are trying to estimate the likelihood of any outcome

Whatever your forecast of the future is, it needs to be in the orbit of the base rate. A base rate gives you a center of gravity.

When you learn that you’re planning on doing something that the base rates tell you is difficult, a realistic view of what the future might have in store for you will encourage you to identify the obstacles that stand in the way for most people. That advance warning gives you the opportunity to develop ways of avoiding or surmounting those obstacles so you can increase your chances of success.

a bad dating story to share. You are trying not to hurt your friend’s feelings. You are trying to be kind. But in doing so, you’re denying them valuable input that could improve the quality of their future dating decisions

Be thankful when people disagree with you in good faith because they are being kind when they do.

the greater harm to you is to shield yourself from disagreement because it feels bad in the moment.

we naturally end up in echo chambers. The inside view feels especially good when it’s sold as the outside view, in the guise of someone supposedly offering an objective perspective that merely confirms what you believe. But that only serves to amplify the inside view, strengthening your view of the world because it feels certified by others.

The more you can interact with the world in a way that invites people around you to give you the outside view, the more accurate your model of the world will become.

you start with the outside view and then go to the inside view. Starting with the outside view gives you the best opportunity to anchor to what’s true of the world in general

Here are two tactics you might try in getting to the outside view: (1) Ask yourself, if a coworker or friend or family member were to have this problem, how would you view their problem?

Ask yourself, if a coworker or friend or family member were to have this problem, how would you view their problem? How might your perspective differ from theirs? What advice might you give them? What kind of solutions would you offer?

decision-making led you to where you are. You can’t change luck. You can only change your decisions. The outside view gets you to focus on what you can change.

When it comes to success or failure, it can be painful to explore the outside view, especially when the inside view feels so good. But it is worth the discomfort.

Motivated reasoning is the tendency to process information to get a conclusion we want rather than to discover what is true.

Accuracy lives at the intersection between the inside view and the outside view.

being smart can make it worse because smart people have more confidence in the truth of their beliefs and can spin better narratives to sway other people (and themselves) toward their point of view.