A blog about judgment, and the gap between thinking you know and actually knowing.
How sure are you?
About your gut, your forecast, the impression that's already formed before you noticed. Five essays here on the gap between feeling certain and being right, and a few small tools for taking its measure.
The essays
- Essay 1 When Your Gut Is Right (and When It Isn't) What Kahneman and Klein figured out together.
- Essay 2 The Four Problems Your Brain Is Always Solving A short tour of why the brain takes shortcuts — and what it costs you.
- Essay 3 What Actually Helps You Think Better The honest answer about debiasing — what works, what doesn't, and what works only sometimes.
- Essay 4 The Forecaster You Already Are How to get better at the predictions you're already making all day.
- Essay 5 The Loop We Built How human bias becomes AI bias becomes new human bias — and what to do about it.
Things you can poke at
- Bias Explorer Look up any of the 188 biases in Benson's Cognitive Bias Codex by name or family. Each one opens to its mechanism, the foundational study, the way it shows up in the world, and the biases it's most related to.
- SEEDS Radial The five families of bias — Similarity, Expedience, Experience, Distance, Safety — with what each one tends to distort and what reliably gets in its way.
- Clear / Obscured Sandbox Drop a situation from your own life into this and see whether your gut was given the kind of feedback it would have needed to be trustworthy on it.
- Intervention Browser Filter the empirical debiasing literature by family of bias and see, for each practice, how large the effect is, how well it transfers out of the lab, what it costs, and where it earns its keep.
- Personal Calibration Trainer Log your own predictions about the coming week and find out how well-calibrated you actually are. Built around your life — not geopolitics.