Think Like a Freak

“It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ,” said the esteemed neurologist Roger Bannister,

When asked to name the attributes of someone who is particularly bad at predicting, Tetlock needed just one word. “Dogmatism,” he says. That is, an unshakable belief they know something to be true even when they don’t.

At university, he had been learning about game theory and now it came in handy.

Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so. There is nothing like the

The conventional wisdom is often wrong. And a blithe acceptance of it can lead to sloppy, wasteful, or even dangerous outcomes. Correlation does not equal causality. When two things travel together, it is tempting to assume that one causes the other.

Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good.

a good start would be to assess the core of the problem as shrewdly as Kobayashi did with his.

is, if you could learn how you might fail without going to the trouble of actually failing? That’s the idea behind a “premortem,” as the psychologist Gary Klein calls it. The idea is simple. Many institutions already conduct a postmortem on failed projects, hoping to learn exactly what killed the patient. A premortem tries to find out what might go

Here is the broader point: whatever problem you’re trying to solve, make sure you’re not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it’s incredibly important to properly define the problem—or, better yet, redefine the problem.