The FIRE Framework: deciding when to trust your gut

April 7, 2019

Here’s a link to a recording of me giving a talk about this topic in 2019. The idea that you should "just trust your gut" - that is, make many life decisions solely based on intuition (as opposed to based on reflection) - is obviously very popular. But I think that there are pretty much only four types of situations where we're best off relying on intuition alone: when a decision is Fast, Irrelevant, Repetitious, or Evolutionary (FIRE for short). Case 1: Fast decisionsThere is no cho...

Misjudging Repeated Risk

July 17, 2017

Some thoughts on how we may massively misjudge the weightiness of decisions that involve doing a risky thing many times: There's a huge difference between riding on the back of a motorcycle once, and buying a motorcycle to ride every weekend, or between buying a cookie and buying a box of 25 cookies, or between taking a boxing lesson once and sparring regularly. Unfortunately, our minds don't necessarily give this difference between doing something one time and doing something T times app...

What if “Free Will” Isn’t Guaranteed?

July 11, 2017

A useful trick that I've used for years: thinking of myself as having sustained free will for only about the next 5 minutes, and assuming my distant-future self has free will only intermittently. If like most people, you think of yourself as continuously having free will in the future, you may have thoughts like:(1) "I'll have an hour to do this project tomorrow, so I don't need to do it now."(2) "Once I'm back from vacation, I'll start going to the gym every day."(3) "I don't need to make t...

Why do people not behave in their own self-interest?

March 19, 2017

Naively, one might assume that people do what it benefits them to do. In fact, that's an assumption commonly made in economics. Yet it's clear that our behavior is not always in our own self-interest. People frequently buy fake supplements, try drugs they know are highly addictive, eat things they know they'll later regret, drive away the people they love most, procrastinate on really important things, and so on. So why do we behave in these strange ways? Well, here's my list of reasons we ...