Make Better Decisions

An essential guide to practicing the cognitive skills needed for making better decisions in the age of data, algorithms, and AI. Data promised to make decisions easier. Algorithms promised to reduce how many decisions we need to make. AI promises--or threatens--to make human decisions obsolete. Yet, the opposite is happening because modern data makes decisions harder and AI makes human judgment more--not less--valuable. All decisions contain an implicit prediction about the future which seems increasingly unpredictable, even chaotic. Data is supposed to help but it doesn't if it's too complex for humans to find meaningful. Data that is confusing, inaccessible, or ambiguous will leave humans relying on their intuition. The result is an evolutionary mismatch between how we think and how machines help us decide.This book contains 50 nudges that have their lineage in scholarship from behavioral economics, cognitive science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Each nudge prompts the reader to use their beautiful, big human brain to notice when our automatic decision-making systems will lead us astray in our complex, modern world, and when they'll lead us in the right direction.



"You already know how to make bad decisions...as do we all. This is the book you've been looking for to help you grow the skills and the confidence to make better decisions more of the time." 

--Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit and How to Begin



"So much research on biases in judgment and thinking; how to make use of it? The Edwards have done just that, distilled the numerous disparate phenomena into a practical guide that you can use."

--Barbara Tversky, Emerita Professor of Psychology, Stanford University, Professor of Psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University and author of Mind in Motion