Base Rates and the Outside View

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

The Good Judgment Project; the practices that measurably improve forecasts.

A military historian's reflections on what history teaches and why we ignore it.

Recurring patterns drawn from world history: biology, morals, religion, economics.

A 20-year test of 28,000 expert forecasts: foxes with many models beat hedgehogs.

How judging firms by their results corrupts most business research and advice.

Eight mistakes experienced decision-makers repeat, and a correction for each.

Evidence that violence of nearly every kind has declined over history, and why.

How to separate skill from luck in business, sport and investing.

Steven Pinker's 500-page empirical survey of progress across 15 dimensions: health, wealth, equality, safety, knowledge, quality of life. Explicitly frames market economies and Enlightenment liberalism as the institutional sources of that progress. Has been criticized for cherry-picking metrics and underweighting catastrophic risks; the data itself is worth engaging with regardless.

Hans Rosling was a global health professor, not an economist, which gives his data-driven case for human progress particular credibility. He shows, in meticulous detail, that almost every quantitative measure of human welfare has improved dramatically over the past century. He attributes this to global trade and economic development without being a polemicist.

Gladwell on underdogs and mistaken assumptions about advantage

How present certainties will look to the future; outside view applied

Bevelin distilling observation and inference habits from Sherlock Holmes