James Surowiecki writing in the New Yorker: In the past, the F.A.A. was remarkably hesitant to take planes out of service. The problems with the DC-10 were well known to regulators for years before a 1979 crash forced them to ground the plane. But, again, those standards no longer apply. In the nineteen-seventies, after all, [...]
Michael Mauboussin
From Samuel Arbesman’s excellent interview of Michael Mauboussin (on his book The Success Equation) Arbesman: What are some of the ways that sampling (including undersampling, biased sampling, and more) can lead us quite astray when understanding skill and luck? Mauboussin: Let’s take a look at undersampling as well as biased sampling. Undersampling failure in business [...]
“Game theory is the study of how people behave in strategic situations. By “strategy” we mean a situation in which a person, when choosing among alternative courses of action, must consider how others might respond to the action he takes. Strategic thinking is crucial not only in checkers, chess, and tic-tac-toe but in many business [...]
There is a lot of wisdom in this: The challenge with history, however, is that it’s a very fickle teacher. Which is a lot of the key to understanding history is what the circumstances were. And what we tend to do when we study history is look for attributes, so circumstances versus attribute thinking. — [...]
Michael Mauboussin, chief investment strategist at Legg Mason, offers two simple techniques to improve the quality of your decision making: a decision journal and a checklist. Many years ago when I first met Danny Kahneman, and Kahneman is one of the preeminent psychologists in the world who won a Nobel Prize for economics in 2002, [...]
