Ask HN: Methods for Decision Making | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Methods for Decision Making

16 pointsemerongi5 comments

I waste a lot of time making decisions, I want to speed it up. I get decent results with the well-known pros/cons table, but I feel like that misses some nuance, plus it's a bit cumbersome to use in some situations.

Any good methods or software out there?

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Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (109 Models Explained)- https://fs.blog/mental-models/

Also, mind mapping is life saver ie. https://whimsical.com/mind-maps/

Oneslate [0, 1] was designed for decision augmentation. Certainly curious to hear if the Oneslate system applies to your method/software search to aid in more efficient decision making. Full bias disclosure: I designed Oneslate.

[0] http://danwolff.net/platforms/oneslate.html [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6glmwOd9Lsc&list=PL8DgRr1QpM...

It depends, of course. Are you making decisions in situations that are familiar or unfamiliar? Is this a one-time or recurring decision? What's at stake - is there a lot to lose, or perhaps is it a question of optimizing. What information is available to you situationally, and in terms of predicting what may happen? Is it just you deciding, or a group; in implementation is it just you or do you need to convince other people.

I am inferring that you want to get better outcomes from operational decision making, and quantifying something might help. I'd suggest looking retrospectively at the decisions you've made, the way you've been making them, and the role of those decisions in the outcomes you've seen. In terms of what factors shape outcomes, what is under your control, what is not? You'll want to model the range of possibilities and impacts of the stuff you don't control ultimately as distributions, and look to forecast outcomes as a combination of what you do and what else can happen, over the range of what you do and the range of what elses. That will look like a decision tree, and at a first pass you can model and evaluate that qualitatively, then shift to a quantiative model. The retrospective question is represent explicitly the factors your outcomes are most sensitive to, and then to focus more quantiatively from there - if it adds value.

Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets" is a good book on decision making under uncertainty in a landscape (poker) that can be modeled quantitatively and in an environement that punishes thinkers that are not dispassionate. Like is not poker but the book is good on dealing with uncertainty.

In terms of hard decisions, Groopman and Hartzband, "Your Medical Mind", is an informed, lucid, and humane book on personal decisions related to healthcare. It's hard to know what to do, given data and advice or not. One line take away: see what people like you have done in similar situations, and how they feel about it.

In terms of strategic decisions, "A Structured Approach to Strategic Decisions", Kahneman, Lovallo, Sibony, [1] is for me the state of the art.

[1] https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-structured-approach-to...

Flip a coin or roll some dice. For the majority of decisions delaying making a choice costs more than making a mistake. You can always fix it later if you picked the wrong option, and most of the time it doesn't actually matter as much as you think it will.

Have you tried using mental models?

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