Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

“It is impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms, less still sophisticated statistical ones.”17

As we will see, computers and collectives remain underutilized guides for decision making across a host of realms including medicine, business, and sports.

In deciding, people often start with a specific piece of information or trait (anchor) and adjust as necessary to come up with a final answer. The bias is for people to make insufficient adjustments from the anchor, leading to off-the-mark responses. Systematically, the final answer leans too close to the anchor, whether or not the anchor is sensib

When you ignore the concept of reversion to the mean, you make three types of mistakes. The first mistake is thinking you’re special.

it must be lived—forwards.”35 So we generally fail to consider enough alternatives looking forward and think we knew what was going on looking backward. The antidote to both is to write down the rationale behind decisions and to consistently revisit past actions. A decision-making journal is a cheap and easy routine to offset hindsight bias and enc

second mistake associated with reversion to the mean—a misinterpretation of what the data says.

collectives are typically more valuable than experts when the problem is complex and specifiable rules cannot solve it.

You should be highly skeptical any time you see “the keys to success” or “formulas for winning.”

a relatively uninformed crowd could predict better than the firm’s best seers.