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Ask HN: Is it possible to practice decision-making / rationality?

5 points by icompetetowin ↗ HN
I'm currently working on decisionschool.org, something that I wanted for myself for a long time but couldn't find, a learning platform for decision-making/rationality.

I managed to create some exercises (multiple choice questions) with the help of friends and online resources. But coming up with practical exercises is still a challenge.

My question to HN is two-fold:

Is it possible to practice decision-making?

And if it is, which ways do you use or have seen?

12 comments

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h2odragon
Isn't that much of what games are about? Perhaps you'd benefit from specifying more tightly the kind of excersice you're after?

"get better at rationality" is a great goal; but how do you judge better rationality vs. less? Isn't there an implicit "better informed / more rational" judge implied by the nature of it? Is that going to be you? A council of Elders? A consensus of whoever shows up? Will that really meet the standard?

Twitch games and war optimize for speed of decisions, and if its not a correct decision you just try again or die. Often thats the most rational choice in that context, but it wouldnt be in others...

icompetetowin
Thanks for the feedback!

I agree with you, I should have been clearer.

I'm talking about decision-making in the context of business & life.

While reading about decision-making in that context, I've come across many concepts (such as mental models).

I've been looking for exercises that would test my understanding of those concepts. And that would give me enough practice to turn them into habits.

giantg2
Many people do practice rationality. The real differentiator is practicing reasonableness.
icompetetowin
That's really interesting, could you expand on "reasonableness"?
giantg2
There was a good article about this using vaccine vs anti-vax positions on Aeon. I can't seem to find it now. The point was that some people who choose not to vaccinate their kids are making a rational choice, but the question is whether or not that choice is also reasonable.
quickthrower2
Thanks to you both for uncovering this rabbit hole. I found this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g28WWuaMLXNzAnR9v/rational-v... which seems to explain the difference and is in line with your vaccination example.

Although whether not vaccinating is rational I need to get my head around that as I’m quite biased on the subject but want to understand that more, otherwise I probably don’t understand the word rational.

giantg2
The example they gave was about the comparative value of being vaccinated vs not. Since the population is vaccinated above the herd immunity rate for the MMR vaccine, then there is a perception by the individual that there is little to no personal value to recieving it given that herd immunity protects them. So in their mind, the risk of an adverse event outweighs the risk of becoming infected. It is rational. Then the question is on whether it is reasonable. For someone with a high likelihood of an adverse event (such as from a prior dose or existing condition) then this is also reasonable. If they don't have an increased likelihood, then maybe it's not reasonable.

Of course if we fall below herd immunity, then the cost/benefit changes. Rational people who previously elected to not be vaccinated (without higher risk factors) would be likely to then elect to be vaccinated, in theory.

icompetetowin
Is this the article: https://aeon.co/essays/anti-vaccination-might-be-rational-bu...

Also this part stood out to me: "Sure, the risks of vaccination were low and the benefits to society were high. But if your kid is the rare person who experiences a severe side effect, the greater good no longer matters."

giantg2
Yeah, that's basically the part that I was thinking of when I was talking about individual benefit. Most people aren't getting vaccinated to protect society, but for their own benefit (as is human nature).
paulz_
Lately I've been learning / playing poker. It feels like the perfect vehicle for what you're describing. I'm still quite new to poker so don't expect any deep insights here. You learn a little bit of the math behind when to expect what card, and what card your opponent is or isn't likely to have. Then you do battle using rationality, mostly against your own emotions.

You get into these situations where you know what the "right" move is but your emotions are firing on all cylinders. All the logical fallacies you've read about over the years (loss aversion, hot hand fallacy, etc) are suddenly extremely compelling. Even knowing that they are fallacies intellectually, it can still be difficult to make the rational decision.

And so you practice. You make the rational choice over and over in order to build an edge over you opponents. You become the house.

Doing this sort of "practice" I've noticed it paying off in places in my daily life. I sometimes find myself thinking of hard ambiguous decisions in poker terms now.

One thing that makes poker, or other games different from real life is knowing if you actually made the right call or not.

In the old poker days you used to have to guess, or talk it over with your poker friends to try to figure out if you bet too much or too little on that hand you can't stop thinking about.

The most modern poker theories and practices are around game theory. Through statistical analysis, simulations, and some ML tooling you're now effectively able to ask what the right move was for any given situation and get an objectively right answer. So if you're willing to use / pay for that software you have objective answers to those questions now.

At the highest levels online players spend many hours practicing with gto trainers to cement the "right" moves for given situations.

A problem I've noticed about trying to apply some of the lessons from poker to real life is that you don't usually get that objective feedback.

In poker sometimes you make a bet and you win, but it turns out it was a very bad bet and you got lucky.

Other times you might make a very good bet 3 times in a row, and get unlucky all 3 times.

In poker you can go back and look to find that they were all the right decision using a GTO (Game Theory Optimized) training software. Real life, not so much.

That said, these types of avenues still feel valuable to me. I really do think poker has improved my rationality and decision making skills. But like poker itself, those improvements are at the edges.

icompetetowin
Thank you for such an in-depth answer!

I've looked at poker and bridge as potential ways to practice decision-making, so your comment is timely.

I wasn't aware of Game Theory Optimized (GTO) training software, but now that I am, I will probably start learning poker with it.

Also as you said, getting objective feedback in real life is hard, I've seen people using decision journals but I find it difficult to keep one.

mettamage
I practiced poker around 2010.

> In poker sometimes you make a bet and you win, but it turns out it was a very bad bet and you got lucky.

What I did was simply simulate variations on the scenario that I lucked out at or had an amazing bad beat. The moment you start to pick 20 variations, you can see quite clearly whether you made the right decision. This is especially the case when it's a bad beat or you lucking out extremely.