Judgement and Decision Making Training

Hear me out.

I think judgment and decision-making can be actively trained. I think it can be trained beyond passive pattern recognition gained through experience (which is the main way it is normally developed). I like this high-level idea and I have some ideas on how to better improve it.

How I reached this conclusion in no particular order

I’ve spent a lot of time on the internet reading a bunch of things. I feel like the collection of information and frameworks is productive but it feels scattered, not easily formatted, not easily remembered. I can take notes on notebooks or in the iPhone notes app or on Notion but it doesn’t accomplish what the purpose of it is - some good input to yield a better output. I’ve had this problem ever since I started using the internet and never found a clean solution.
An era of data excess and information excess = a world that rewards information distributionre-distribution (example - xcross-posting accounts on X or Reddit that share non-OC content with an OC audience gets attention and engagement).
“Do what you are good at, what you enjoy, and where you can create value for the world” - Sam Altman. I think the value in this is probably a really good formula to maximize short-term fun and long-term fun.
1. Maybe the best thing to optimize is focusing on maximal total aggregate happiness. Combination of fun (multiple definitions), pleasure (hedonistic short-term enjoyment), satisfaction (working on something difficult for a long time and having a productive output).
  Maximizing short-term fun (self-explanatory) and long-term fun (enjoying satisfying projects) seems like a good priority.
Life is a bunch of situations one after the other of - situation occurs, you do risk analysis with imperfect information, you make a decision, and you hope the outcome is positiveaccretive. Long-term commitment does compound. This is the most important part to me.
1. This idea of a range of outcomes, the rare ones when they occur, your mind thinks, okay, this has occurred once, it can happen again. Why not just assume rare things happen, because they in fact do!
It is completely fine to consume and think about abstract concepts just for abstract-sake, BUT it also would be nice if they could help refine the black box and yield a better output. Thinking completely in the ether is something I’m guilty of but I enjoy…so I’m the first to say that…but it would be helpful to be encouraged every so often to think “how does this improve or help me”

Side note - in helping myself and others “improve”…important to think about feedback and making ideas and suggestions helpful. Never want to give “advice”. But aim to suggest that which is as close to truth as possible.

Now in summary, I have not come across any resource that best compiles better ways to think about it. Although there is some content. Examples.

People love to talk about math, science, logic, game theory, philosophy, psychology as fields related to this. I tend to agree.

Easy way to see the utility of game theory is thinking about how other people make decisions and how collective decision-making influences your own decision-making in a system.

Philosophy helps expand perspectives and views and takes and can inform better decisions.

For things that are logically, logic obviously is helpful, but plenty of things aren’t logical, so you sort of lose out on that utility AND if you apply logical concepts to that which is illogical, you probably have negative value-add and cause net harm.

What does this all mean

Consuming information from the lens of “how does this information, if at all, inform my judgment and decision making” which I think a lot of things offer this.
Although it is important to also train your filter of what is value add and what isn’t (not easy).
I’m grateful that during the day, I get the opportunity to think about this in relation to my work but the point of this is to think about what concepts related to investing can apply to life (part of this blog) and vice versa (part of my work) as I don’t at this time want to talk really about investing since it is more singular and I’d rather think of this exercise of how do I improve the entirety of my personal system of judgment and decision making to apply to all aspects of my life.

Why is this ACTUALLY important

If every decision you make every again was .1-1% better, compounded you’d live a materially better life with better outcomes. So hopefully when I’m (current age + 30), my day-to-day decisions are better informed by doing all of this work and the output is materially better vs. what the default passive decision would have been.

How do you do this

Tough part. Early brainstorming

Think about a mental model — think about an example post hoc where it could have been applied, and keep it in top of mind until it happens once, then it’ll better cement as pattern recognition
Read a concept in game theory or philosophy and think about it until it can be applied then move to the next so it cements better.

This is some groundwork so now to build on it.

Cheers,

Vish

Published on September 30, 2023.