How to Use Both Your Wits in a Startup
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
It became quite obvious that it's hopelessly impossible to eliminate the myriad of nearly infinite biases we all have - something that has been separately established by my own beliefs anyway (Jeremiah 17:9). Not to mention there's a far easier way to limit bias in decision making: Ask a few others for feedback (Proverbs 15:22).
What I find funny is that there is supposedly a "comprehensive" list of "20 Cognitive Biases", as if that somehow covers 90% of one's regular biases in decision making. Everyone is biased in tens of thousands of particular ways simply based on the seemingly infinite different combinations of limited life experiences we have -- and many of those biases are unconscious, unintended, and so subtle that they simply evade detection unless there was another to point them out.
That's why I think it's better to live with bias, which is to say that I ask myself if I'm making a decision that is biased toward love, grace, and kindness. Use your precious "system 2" energy to bias yourself toward those things. It's the same as recognizing counterfeit currency - a man doesn't study the infinite possible counterfeits, he studies every detail of the authentic bill. And through that training to bias himself toward what is genuine, he gains the ability to immediately recognize the counterfeits.
Happy to answer or clarify any questions.
Also, at the end of the day, you have to make a judgement about the quality and benefits of the outcome and keep adding that to your System 1 dataset.
Interesting, what other sources can one look at, to go beyond this small preview?
If you'd like to explore atheistic consciousness, try Sam Harris.
Descartes' Error is a good book for understanding the relationship between logic and emotion.
Tons of good books on meditation out there. If you want to know more about eastern philosophy, a great short book is the Tao of Pooh. Yes, the bear.
It talks about how experienced people can make higher quality decisions by taking into account their intuition vs just trying to decide using logic.
https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-People-Make-Decisions/d...
(I say this as someone who has read Thinking, Fast and Slow and other Kahneman books.)
This looks like a typo; "System 1" and "System 2" should be swapped.
Similarly, I don't know why people use the terms "Type 1" and "Type 2" errors when "False positive" and "False negative" are available.
However, I think perhaps the author is mixing up 'both wits' (logical vs emotional thinking) with the two systems thinking from the TFaS book(intuitive vs logical thinking), at least in the writeup.
I am more inclined to believe that intuition and logic based thought processes are superior to one that has an emotional dimension, at least for running a business.
As an example, I think if in the Cheezburger case the author was less emotional, he would have responded rather than reacted to the perceived threat- which is arguably a better way to deal with the situation.
Lack of affect(especially fear) is a defining quality of psychopathy, which happens to be very common amongst CEOs [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace#C...
The problem with logic is it proceeds from facts. It doesn't account well for unknowns, nor the "unknown unknowns".