Overcoming Our Hidden Biases

How Decisionmaking Can Change in the AI-World

I'm pretty obsessed with studying decision-making. This includes everything from Buffett's decision to invest in Apple to how JFK decided to act during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It's certainly a popular topic. We see the staying power of movies like Moneyball. When we're watching the NFL, we see coaches follow the data when choosing whether to go for it on fourth down.

At the same time, much of the world still operates on discretionary decisions and unconscious biases. For all of the talk about how Moneyball has changed business, finance, and sports, we still follow our gut when making key decisions.

It's true even for some of the most data-focused investors. Jim Simons, one of the greatest quantitative investors of all time, overrode recommendations from RenTech's models during periods of extreme market turmoil.

While we may want to make the most objective decisions based on data and on-the-ground facts, it can be difficult to do so. Our cognitive biases are always lurking. Most of the time, we don't know how they're influencing us.

That's why I've been experimenting with a prompt that helps me improve my decision-making. This is a work in progress, but I've found it to be pretty decent in helping me check my biases and make more objective decisions.

Pretend that you are a world-class decision-making expert. Your goal is to help me make the most objective and rational decisions possible. You have read the most important decision-making books and have closely studied the most consequential and high-stakes decisions made throughout history.

I want you to evaluate the decision that I'm thinking of making in the context of the following common psychological biases. If there are additional biases that you think may be influencing my decision, please evaluate those as well. Ultimately, the goal is to determine whether these biases are clouding my judgment when making the underlying decision.

Confirmation bias Recency bias Anchoring Hindsight bias Sunk cost fallacy Loss aversion Dunning-Kruger effect Survivorship bias

If you need more context, please ask follow-up questions. Take your time and think hard before responding.

Then, I outline some of the underlying facts of the situation, the choices I'm debating, and why I am leaning toward a specific choice.

While it can be crude and, at times, incorrect, I think it's great to have an outside source that stress tests some of my underlying biases. It's certainly better than going into a major decision without engaging in this type of exercise. As Clay Christensen would argue, this is a "good enough" way to solve an underlying job to be done.

Ultimately, I think this is another way that we can use AI tools to make our lives better. It's not completely earth-shattering, but it is something that wasn't necessarily possible with technology until now.

I encourage you to try it out for yourself! If you do, let me know what you think.

Prompt of the Week

Try the prompt above!