How sure are you?

I write here about judgment — more specifically, about the gap between what you think you know and what you actually know, and what to do about it.

Most popular writing on biases and decision-making asks the wrong question. What's wrong with your thinking? implies there's a defect to be fixed. There isn't. The mechanics that produce systematic errors are the same mechanics that produce most of the judgments that go right. The interesting question is which is which, when, and what to do about it. That's what I'm trying to write about.

There are five essays here. They don't require any prior reading — if you've never heard of Daniel Kahneman, you're in the right place; if you have, you'll probably skim faster. Each one comes with one interactive piece — a sandbox, a browser, a trainer — that does what prose alone can't.

What I'm not trying to do

This is not a list of biases to memorize. It's not a course. And it's not a contrarian alternative to the work of Kahneman, Tversky, Klein, Gigerenzer, Tetlock, or any of the people whose research it draws on — I'm building on their work, not arguing with it. The writing tries to follow Kahneman's own model in Thinking, Fast and Slow: examples before names, mechanisms before verdicts, the simple version of the complicated thing.

It's also not a wellness site. There's no manifesting, no thirty-day reset, no "ten habits highly effective people swear by." The Stoics show up in two or three places, but respectfully — careful people working two thousand years ago sometimes arrived at the same conclusions modern researchers later confirmed, and I think that's worth saying.

About the author

Presian Nedyalkov, on the web at presiannedyalkov.info.

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