Forecasting and Decision Making Under Uncertainty

Clausewitz introduces friction, fog, and the political nature of conflict as irreducible elements of strategy. His insistence that war is a continuation of politics by other means is the foundational challenge to anyone who wants a purely technical theory of winning.

Game theory without maths: look forward, reason back, and make threats credible.

How people learned to measure risk, from early probability to portfolio theory.

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

Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.

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.

The biases that distort managers' decisions, with exercises that show them.

A life across economics, psychology, organisations and artificial intelligence.

Von Neumann, game theory and the prisoner's dilemma in nuclear strategy.

Game theory without maths, with new examples: commitment, signals, bargaining.

How randomness shapes our lives, the history of probability, and why we misread it.

What physics, biology, psychology and other fields teach about investing.

How the 37 days after Sarajevo led Europe into the First World War.

Why economics misapplies probability to problems where the future is unknowable.

Kahneman died 27 March 2024; this was his last book.

Why megaprojects overrun, and the reference-class forecasting correction.

Calibration and the value of information applied to intangibles.

Dialogue form; Munger's inversion habit worked through systematically.

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths translate classical computer science results — optimal stopping, explore/exploit tradeoffs, scheduling — into guidance for human decisions. The 37% rule for when to stop searching and commit is the most cited single insight.

Why people mistake luck for skill, above all in markets.

How behavioural economics was built against economists who assumed rational agents.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

Incerto volume 5

A working catalogue of 99 cognitive errors, organized so you can actually use it. Less academic than Kahneman, more encyclopedic than Duke. The format — one bias per short chapter — makes it useful as a pre-mortem checklist before consequential decisions.

Second-level thinking, risk and market cycles, drawn from Oaktree's client memos.

Michael Lewis's account of the Kahneman-Tversky collaboration works as intellectual biography and as a second path through the research for readers who find academic writing slow. The friendship and its eventual fracture clarifies how two very different minds produced work that neither could have done alone.

Judge decisions by their reasoning, not their outcomes, and think in odds.

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

Conflict as bargaining: commitment, credible threats and focal points.

How the wish for agreement in close groups led to fiascos like the Bay of Pigs.

A neurologist on the varieties of luck in scientific discovery

Scenario planning: building strategic vision for business and life amid uncertainty.

A step-by-step method for making better decisions in life and work.

How firefighters, pilots and other experts decide under time pressure.

Papers on how people choose under risk, from prospect theory to framing.

Mental models from physics, biology and psychology, applied to investing.

Edited volume.

Reasoning methods of fictional detectives such as Dupin applied to stock analysis.

Why some people survive disasters that kill others in the same circumstances.

Builds out Munger's latticework idea from primary sources.

How snap judgments work, when to trust them and when they mislead.

Beyond a point, more options make people less likely to choose and less satisfied.

When groups judge better than experts, and the four conditions that make it work.

Essays on investing philosophy, psychology, competition and science.

Tavris and Aronson focus on what happens after a bias fires: the self-justification, narrative revision, and escalating commitment that follow. Cognitive dissonance, they argue, is not a personality flaw but a universal mechanism, and understanding it explains police misconduct, political tribalism, and therapy failures in a single framework.

Binmore on when Bayesian decision theory applies and when it does not

Why people misjudge risk; the availability heuristic in public life

Why policies backfire in a networked world, drawing on complexity theory and history.

Investing lessons from the career-defining mistakes of billionaire investors.

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

The long-run trends set to reshape economies and markets over the coming decades.

How checklists stop experts in complex fields failing to apply what they know.

Seventy questions to ask before buying any business.

Incerto volume 4

Experiments showing most cheating is many people cheating a little.

Why some forecasts succeed and most fail, from weather to earthquakes and economics.

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

Most decisions improve if you wait until the last responsible moment.

Bevelin distilling observation and inference habits from Sherlock Holmes

Four traps that ruin decisions, such as narrow framing, and a process to beat each.

Thought experiments and other tools a philosopher uses to reason carefully.

People can't act randomly, and how to exploit that in games, tests and markets.

Why aviation learns from every failure while fields like medicine hide theirs.

Yudkowsky's collected LessWrong essays, free online and in compiled book form, develop the epistemic foundations that underpin his AI doom arguments. The reasoning about cognitive biases, Bayesian updating, and decision theory is independently useful; the AI safety arguments that follow are the most influential non-peer-reviewed work in the field.

Subtitled A Guide to Clear Thinking About Wall Street, Investing, and Life.

Rethinking your beliefs is a skill apart from intelligence, and how to practise it.

The ten attributes of successful investors: how to think well, not what to think.

Complex problems yield to trial and error, not expert plans, and how to run it.

Edited volume

Decision rules from building Bridgewater: radical truth and radical transparency.

A primer on the theory of games of strategy, written for non-specialists.

Meadows wrote this before systems thinking became a popular phrase, and it remains the clearest account of why short-term interventions in complex systems so often backfire. The chapter on leverage points is the conceptual core of what long-term thinking actually requires from decision-makers.