I am not-very-far-at-all into Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath, but even just from the introduction it’s apparent that the book has a huge overlap with a lot of CFAR’s Instrumental Rationality content. And I know from reading Switch (also a great book) that they are thorough researchers and enjoyable authors.
I suspect that even if most of the concepts are old hat, it will be helpful to have more analogies, both for my own sake and to facilitate better explanations of CFAR concepts to people-unfamiliar-with-our-terminology.
The table of contents… (text in parens indicate my guess as to what it relates to, sometimes just from the title, other times I glance at the pages) Widen Your Options
Avoid a Narrow Frame (alternative hypothesis generation)
Multitrack (related to comfort-zone expansion, affordance-generation; not getting stuck in ruts)
Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem (updating on others) Reality-Test Your Assumptions
Consider the Opposite (e.g. status quo bias)
Zoom In, Zoom Out (outside view)
Ooch (I had no idea what this was, but the first page yields “to ooch is to construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis”) Attain Distance before Deciding
Overcome Short-Term Emotion (System 1 vs System 2, urges vs goals)
Honor Your Core Priorities (goal factoring, winning at arguments) Prepare to be Wrong
Bookend the Future (confidence intervals, bookends refer to the min/max etc)
Set a Tripwire (schelling points/fences, murphyjitsu / planning kata / contingency planning) ..
Trusting the Process (a concept proposed in GTD unit… just skimmed the chapter though and while it appears valuable/useful, not obviously linked to CFAR stuff)
So basically this is just workshop-in-a-book. I mean, lacking the food/face-to-face-time/intensiveness/instructors-to-ask-questions-of/interactivity/commitment-mechanisms/followup/community, but otherwise seems to be a good literature review on instrumental rationality. Again, I’ve barely started it, but the authors are good and this is a good topic, so I would bet high odds on it being worth reading.
Haven’t yet, but I got several chapters in before it got put on hold, and I’ve already used some of the concepts/techniques, which is impressive for a book. This is also part of why I’m reading it slowly: so I can gradually integrate it.
One that has emerged several times: Never make an “X or not” decision IIRC, studies reveal that those decisions are statistically regretted. We don’t make them well. By contrast, decisions between 3 or more options are usually well-made. Part of it is that even if you choose one of the original two, you have better context for them.
One technique they recommend is to imagine that a genie comes and says, “About those options you’re considering… sorry, you can’t do either of them. You have to do something else.” … This little hack works pretty well.
I am not-very-far-at-all into Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath, but even just from the introduction it’s apparent that the book has a huge overlap with a lot of CFAR’s Instrumental Rationality content. And I know from reading Switch (also a great book) that they are thorough researchers and enjoyable authors.
I suspect that even if most of the concepts are old hat, it will be helpful to have more analogies, both for my own sake and to facilitate better explanations of CFAR concepts to people-unfamiliar-with-our-terminology.
The table of contents… (text in parens indicate my guess as to what it relates to, sometimes just from the title, other times I glance at the pages)
Widen Your Options
Avoid a Narrow Frame (alternative hypothesis generation)
Multitrack (related to comfort-zone expansion, affordance-generation; not getting stuck in ruts)
Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem (updating on others)
Reality-Test Your Assumptions
Consider the Opposite (e.g. status quo bias)
Zoom In, Zoom Out (outside view)
Ooch (I had no idea what this was, but the first page yields “to ooch is to construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis”)
Attain Distance before Deciding
Overcome Short-Term Emotion (System 1 vs System 2, urges vs goals)
Honor Your Core Priorities (goal factoring, winning at arguments)
Prepare to be Wrong
Bookend the Future (confidence intervals, bookends refer to the min/max etc)
Set a Tripwire (schelling points/fences, murphyjitsu / planning kata / contingency planning)
..
Trusting the Process (a concept proposed in GTD unit… just skimmed the chapter though and while it appears valuable/useful, not obviously linked to CFAR stuff)
So basically this is just workshop-in-a-book. I mean, lacking the food/face-to-face-time/intensiveness/instructors-to-ask-questions-of/interactivity/commitment-mechanisms/followup/community, but otherwise seems to be a good literature review on instrumental rationality. Again, I’ve barely started it, but the authors are good and this is a good topic, so I would bet high odds on it being worth reading.
If you’ve finished the book, how was it?
Haven’t yet, but I got several chapters in before it got put on hold, and I’ve already used some of the concepts/techniques, which is impressive for a book. This is also part of why I’m reading it slowly: so I can gradually integrate it.
One that has emerged several times:
Never make an “X or not” decision
IIRC, studies reveal that those decisions are statistically regretted. We don’t make them well. By contrast, decisions between 3 or more options are usually well-made. Part of it is that even if you choose one of the original two, you have better context for them.
One technique they recommend is to imagine that a genie comes and says, “About those options you’re considering… sorry, you can’t do either of them. You have to do something else.” … This little hack works pretty well.