--- title: Decision Making description: This topic covers cognitive biases, analytical frameworks, and risk assessment models. Learners will understand how to evaluate complex choices, minimize cognitive errors, and make more rational, structured decisions in personal and professional contexts. category: personal-development subcategory: personal-development difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/decision-making --- # Decision Making This topic covers cognitive biases, analytical frameworks, and risk assessment models. Learners will understand how to evaluate complex choices, minimize cognitive errors, and make more rational, structured decisions in personal and professional contexts. ## Available Resources 6 Books • 4 Courses • 9 Websites ## Books ### 1. Antifragile **Author:** Nassim Nicholas Taleb Taleb's argument that some systems gain from volatility, stress and error while fragile ones break. Introduces optionality, via negativa and barbell strategies, giving readers a heuristic vocabulary for making decisions under uncertainty without forecasting. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812979680?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** antifragility, risk, uncertainty, decision-making, optionality ### 2. Thinking, Fast and Slow **Author:** Daniel Kahneman A foundational exploration of cognitive architecture and the systemic biases that shape human decision-making. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/s?k=0141033576&tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** cognitive-biases, decision-making, heuristics, dual-process-theory, behavioral-economics ### 3. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction **Author:** Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner A book that makes clear thinking falsifiable — it supplies a scoring rule, so the reader can find out whether their models actually work rather than just admiring them. Tetlock's report on the IARPA forecasting tournament, where volunteer forecasters beat intelligence analysts. Covers Brier scoring, base rates, breaking questions into tractable parts, updating in small increments, and the measurable habits that separate accurate forecasters from confident pundits. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0804136718?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** forecasting, probabilistic-thinking, brier-score, base-rates, judgment-under-uncertainty ### 4. Principles: Life and Work **Author:** Ray Dalio Ray Dalio sets out the life and management principles he developed running Bridgewater Associates: radical truth and transparency, believability-weighted decision-making, learning from mistakes, and designing organizations as machines. Readers learn a structured method for making decisions and building teams that confront disagreement openly. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/1501124021?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** decision-making, organizational-culture, management, radical-transparency, leadership ### 5. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work **Author:** Chip Heath, Dan Heath The Heath brothers diagnose four villains of decision making: narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion, and overconfidence, then offer the WRAP process against each. Readers get concrete habits like widening options and running small tests before committing. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307956393?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 6. The Decision Book **Author:** Mikael Krogerus & Roman Tschäppeler Fifty decision-making and strategic-thinking models, from the Eisenhower matrix to the BCG box and the Swiss cheese model, each laid out in two pages with a diagram. Helps you pick a suitable frame for a given problem quickly. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1846683955?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, personal-development, personal-development ## Websites ### 1. Your Bias Is **Author:** Jesse Richardson Illustrated reference to 24 common cognitive biases, including anchoring, confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, groupthink, and the halo effect. Each bias has a short page with an explanation and example, so readers can recognise these mental shortcuts in their own reasoning. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.yourbias.is/ **Tags:** cognitive-biases, heuristics, reasoning, decision-making ### 2. Principles by Ray Dalio Free online access to core management principles (highly upvoted in Reddit threads) **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.principles.com/ **Tags:** ray-dalio, decision-making, organizational-culture, management-principles ### 3. LessWrong A tag page collecting LessWrong posts on causal, evidential, and functional decision theory, Newcomb-like problems, and how agents should choose under uncertainty. Working through it builds vocabulary for reasoning about choices formally rather than by intuition alone. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/decision-theory **Tags:** decision-theory, rationality, probability, cognitive-bias ### 4. Farnam Street A hub of essays and interviews on mental models, cognitive bias, inversion, and second-order thinking, written and curated by Shane Parrish. Readers pick up a vocabulary of reusable models and checklists for slowing down consequential decisions. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://fs.blog/decision-making/ **Tags:** mental-models, decision-making, cognitive-bias, critical-thinking ### 5. Farnam Street (fs.blog) **Author:** Shane Parrish Shane Parrish's essay archive on mental models, decision-making and judgment, drawing on ideas from psychology, economics and biography. Reading it gives you a vocabulary of reusable frames such as inversion, second-order effects and circle of competence for working through decisions. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://fs.blog/ **Tags:** mental-models, decision-making, critical-thinking, cognitive-biases ### 6. Clearer Thinking Library of more than eighty free interactive tools and self-assessments from the research lab Spark Wave, covering cognitive biases, probability estimates, goal setting and logical fallacies, letting you test your own judgment against evidence. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.clearerthinking.org/ **Tags:** decision-making, cognitive-bias, rationality, self-assessment, probability ### 7. hbr.org Harvard Business Review (hbr.org) offers research-based articles, case studies, and practical guidance on leadership, strategy, and organizational performance for managers and executives. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://hbr.org **Tags:** websites, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 8. lesswrong.com LessWrong is a community blog and forum focused on rationality, decision theory, and cognitive biases. It features long-form essays and discussions, including the popular Sequences on Bayesian reasoning, critical thinking, and AI risk. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://lesswrong.com **Tags:** websites, humanities-social-sciences, cognitive-science ### 9. mindtools.com Mind Tools offers practical business and management resources—articles, templates, checklists, and self-assessments—covering business communication, leadership, teamwork, meetings, and professional writing. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://mindtools.com **Tags:** websites, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ## Courses ### 1. Model Thinking We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms, and governments whose behaviors aggregate to produce novel, unexpected phenomena. We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense of it? Models. Evidence shows that people who think with models consistently outperform those who don't. And, moreover people who think with lots of models outperform people who use only one. Why do models make us better thinkers? Models help us to better organize information - to make sense of that fire hose or hairball of data (choose your metaphor) available on the Internet. Models improve our abilities to make accurate forecasts. They help us make better decisions and adopt more effective strategies. They even can improve our ability to design institutions and procedures. In this class, I present a starter kit of models: I start with models of tipping points. I move on to cover models explain the wisdom of crowds, models that show why some countries are rich and some are poor, and models that help unpack the strategic decisions of firm and politicians. The models covered in this class provide a foundation for future social science classes, whether they be in economics, political science, business, or sociology. Mastering this material will give you a huge leg up in advanced courses. They also help you in life. Here's how the course will work. For each model, I present a short, easily digestible overview lecture. Then, I'll dig deeper. I'll go into the technical details of the model. Those technical lectures won't require calculus but be prepared for some algebra. For all the lectures, I'll offer some questions and we'll have quizzes and even a final exam. If you decide to do the deep dive, and take all the quizzes and the exam, you'll receive a Course Certificate. If you just decide to follow along for the introductory lectures to gain some exposure that's fine too. It's all free. And it's all here to help make you a better thinker! **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking **Tags:** mental-models, complexity, social-science, modeling, decision-making ### 2. Decision Making In this course, you will learn the concept of decision making from the rational and psychological points of view. We will discuss the limits to rationality; the interplay between emotional thinking and rational thinking when making decisions; the systematic errors provoked by our cognitive biases and by the use of heuristics; the role of emotions and intuition in decisions; the aleatory errors (noise); and possible remedies and leverage on all these aspects when making decisions. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Duration:** 25 hours in total, 5 weeks | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/decision-making-fia **Tags:** courses, humanities-social-sciences, cognitive-science ### 3. Strategic Decision Making University of Maryland course on turning organizational data into strategic choices. Covers Porter's Five Forces, judging data quality, deciding under uncertainty, low-code tools, and AI analytics, so you can structure and defend business decisions with evidence. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/making-evidence-based-strategic-decisions **Tags:** courses, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ### 4. Advanced Decision Making Discover the foundational concepts that support modern data science and learn to analyze various data types and quality to make smart business decisions. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.edx.org/learn/decision-making/babson-college-analytics-for-decision-making **Tags:** courses, business-entrepreneurship, business-fundamentals ## Podcasts ### 1. The Decision Corner **Author:** The Decision Lab The Decision Corner connects you with cutting-edge insights from the world's best applied behavioral scientists to bring wisdom to your daily and professional life. Rather than talking about nudges and trying to codify science into design principles, TDC goes deep and finds out just how the world's brightest minds solve complex real-world problems using the social sciences. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free **Link:** thedecisionlab.com **Tags:** behavioral-science, behavioral-economics, applied-psychology, decision-making --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/decision-making