What are the chances that the new restaurant we're opening will succeed? We're going to have the best lasagne that anyone has ever tasted, plus some fancy cocktails with creative names. We can't fail, right? Well, once we start thinking probabilistically, we have to acknowledge that failure is indeed one possible outcome. But how can … Continue reading Rationality Recap – Base Rates and the Outside View →

Harry Truman famously asked for a one-handed economist. He was tired of his advisors giving wishy washy answers that began with, "On the one hand...." But if Truman had been wiser, he might have sought out two-handed advisors, or perhaps even three or four-handed ones. The most wrong people on Earth tend to be the … Continue reading Rationality Recap: Probabilistic Thinking and Bayes’ Theorem →

"Everything happens for a reason you make up afterwards." @TheTweetOfGod History is full of geniuses who achieved almost unimaginable feats of brilliance and ingenuity. But it's also full of fools who went utterly and spectacularly wrong. Sometimes the geniuses and the fools were the same people! And for all of those wrong people, the really scary … Continue reading Rationality Recap →