The blog about the gap between what you think you know and what you actually know.https://how-sure.com/en-ushttps://how-sure.com/essays/when-your-gut-is-right/https://how-sure.com/essays/when-your-gut-is-right/Two of the most-cited psychologists of the last fifty years spent decades reaching opposite-looking conclusions about intuition. In 2009 they sat down together and worked out the conditions under which each of them was right. The conditions are unsurprising once you see them — and they're the foundation of everything that follows.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://how-sure.com/essays/four-problems/https://how-sure.com/essays/four-problems/Two hundred named biases sounds like a list of two hundred bugs. It isn't. The brain is solving four genuinely hard problems all the time, and biases are the shape those solutions take. Once you see the four problems, the long list of biases organizes itself.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://how-sure.com/essays/what-actually-helps/https://how-sure.com/essays/what-actually-helps/Learn about your biases and you'll think better is the popular story, and it's mostly not true. But that doesn't mean nothing helps. The interventions that do work tell you something interesting about how cognition actually changes — not by trying harder, but by redesigning the situation around the decision.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://how-sure.com/essays/the-forecaster-you-already-are/https://how-sure.com/essays/the-forecaster-you-already-are/People talk about superforecasters like they're a separate species — geopolitical analysts predicting binary world events. But the deeper point is that everyone forecasts constantly. Whether the partner's mood will hold through dinner, whether traffic will be light, whether this hire will work out, whether you'll regret the purchase. These are bets being placed all day, mostly invisibly. The interesting research is on what does and doesn't help you get better at them.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://how-sure.com/essays/the-loop-we-built/https://how-sure.com/essays/the-loop-we-built/AI doesn't invent new biases as much as it scales the ones we already have. The path is now well enough understood to walk through plainly: a human takes a shortcut, that becomes training data, that becomes a model, that gets deployed back to humans who over-trust it, and the resulting decisions become next year's data. Everything in the previous four essays now has an amplifier.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT