How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

• Resulting
  • A mental shortcut in which we use the quality of an outcome to figure out the quality of a decision.
• Hindsight bias
  • The tendency to believe that an outcome, after it occurs, was predictable or inevitable.
  • Like resulting, is a manifestation of the outsized influence of outcomes. The outcome casts a shadow over your ability to accurately remember what you knew at the time of the decision.
• Memory creep
  • Post outcome knowledge creeps into your memory of what you knew or was knowable before the decision was made.
• Counuterfactual
  • A what-if. A possible outcome of a decision that is not the one that actually occured. An imagined, hypothetical state of the world.