How do I remove the effect of cognitive biases on my decision making? My current idea is to—one, train myself to recognize the points when biases may affect me; two, when making an important decision with a high cost or influence on my future, make the decision the ‘academic’ way.
Is this optimal? Do you have any better solutions?
Also, which book is better to use as a starting point - ‘Judgement in Managerial decision Making’, or ‘Judgement under Uncertainty’? Is ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ worth spending time on compared to actively practicing the skill of recognizing biases that influenced your thinking during the day?
Thank you.
To readers -
Is it worth reading any historical narrative or biographical account if my aim is to improve my life in specific ways using that knowledge, if luck/survivor bias/outcome bias plays a huge part in whose life is memorialised this way?
I’ll provide an example to make it clear—will reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln actually improve me in a specific way, like providing me a model for leadership, or way to handle people, or is his success based on his principles just context dependent, or the result of luck?
What I have observed: I have read the biographies of Steve Jobs, Napoleon, and Julius Caesar, and I haven’t found any improvement in me, nor did I get specific insights into aspects of life, with one exception—my mindset changed to become more ambitious.
gwern (IDK if /u/gwern works here) - you have read a lot of nonfiction of this type—hell, you have recently read the Quincey autobiography. What do you think?