Title: Cognitive Biases Quick Reference For Decision Making — LearnCoachAssist

Q: Confirmation bias?
A: Tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information that confirms our prior beliefs. Counter: deliberately seek disconfirming evidence.

Q: Anchoring bias?
A: Over-relying on the first piece of information (the 'anchor'). Counter: generate your own estimate before seeing the anchor.

Q: Availability heuristic?
A: Judging probability by how easily examples come to mind. Counter: ask 'what's the actual base rate?'

Q: Sunk cost fallacy?
A: Continuing because of past investment, not future expected value. Counter: ask 'If I were starting fresh today, would I do this?'

Q: Survivorship bias?
A: Drawing lessons only from winners while ignoring those who failed. Counter: study failures with equal rigor.

Q: Dunning-Kruger effect?
A: Low-skill individuals overestimate ability; experts underestimate (because they realize what they don't know). Counter: calibrate against external feedback.

Q: Halo effect?
A: One positive trait colors overall judgment of a person/product. Counter: evaluate attributes separately and weight explicitly.

Q: Recency bias?
A: Weighing recent events more heavily than older ones. Counter: longer time windows in your analysis.

Q: Bandwagon effect?
A: Adopting beliefs because many others do. Counter: independent first principles thinking.

Q: Loss aversion?
A: Losses feel ~2× more painful than equivalent gains. Counter: frame decisions symmetrically and pre-commit to thresholds.

Q: Framing effect?
A: Same outcome described as gain vs loss produces different choices. Counter: restate the problem from multiple frames before deciding.

Q: Hindsight bias?
A: 'I knew it all along.' Past outcomes seem more predictable than they were. Counter: keep a pre-mortem journal — write predictions before events.

Q: Self-serving bias?
A: Crediting success to self, failure to circumstance. Counter: ask a trusted critic for their version.

Q: Fundamental attribution error?
A: Attributing others' behavior to character, our own to circumstance. Counter: ask 'what situation might explain this?'

Q: Status quo bias?
A: Preferring the current state for its own sake. Counter: ask 'if today's state didn't exist, would we create it?'

Q: Endowment effect?
A: Valuing things more once we own them. Counter: imagine selling — what would you pay if you didn't already own it?

Q: Negativity bias?
A: Bad events impact us more than equivalent good ones. Counter: deliberately log small wins to calibrate.

Q: Confabulation?
A: Generating a plausible explanation for behavior whose real cause is unknown to us. Counter: get curious about your own reasoning.

Q: Planning fallacy?
A: Underestimating time/cost of future tasks despite past experience to the contrary. Counter: use reference-class forecasting — compare with similar past projects.

Q: Optimism bias?
A: Believing we're less likely to experience negative events than others. Counter: cite base rates explicitly.

Q: Outcome bias?
A: Judging a decision by its outcome rather than its quality at the time. Counter: separate process from outcome in retrospectives.

Q: Anchoring in negotiation?
A: First offer sets the anchor for the deal. Counter: come with your own well-justified anchor — don't let the other side anchor first.

Q: Curse of knowledge?
A: Experts assume audience knows what they know. Counter: have a non-expert review your communications.

Q: Ikea effect?
A: We overvalue things we built ourselves. Counter: get blinded reviews.

Q: False consensus effect?
A: Overestimating how much others share our views. Counter: survey or ask explicitly.

Q: Authority bias?
A: Over-weighting input from authority figures regardless of relevance. Counter: separate identity from argument quality.

Q: Bystander effect?
A: People less likely to help in groups (assume someone else will). Counter: assign explicit responsibility.

Q: Choice overload?
A: Too many options can paralyze decisions and reduce satisfaction. Counter: pre-filter to 3-5 finalists.

Q: Mere exposure effect?
A: Familiarity increases liking. Counter: blind testing for objective evaluation.

Q: Selection bias?
A: Sample isn't representative of the population. Counter: trace how subjects entered your data; randomize where possible.

Q: Base rate neglect?
A: Ignoring overall frequency in favor of vivid individual cases. Counter: compute Bayesian posterior with both base rate and evidence.

Q: Gambler's fallacy?
A: Believing past random events affect future ones (e.g., 'red is due'). Counter: each event is independent; trust the math.

Q: Hot hand fallacy?
A: Believing streaks predict more of the same in independent events. (Some debate exists in performance domains.) Counter: test against random shuffles.

Q: Pareidolia?
A: Seeing patterns where none exist (faces in clouds, signals in noise). Counter: hold out test data; require statistical significance.

Q: Narrative fallacy?
A: Crafting coherent stories that explain randomness. Counter: ask what would falsify the narrative.

Q: Backfire effect?
A: Disconfirming evidence sometimes strengthens beliefs. Counter: don't argue facts to entrenched views; build trust + curiosity first.

Q: Anchoring on round numbers?
A: Estimates cluster on multiples of 5 or 10 even when more precise values are warranted. Counter: force odd intermediate guesses.

Q: Decoy effect?
A: Adding an inferior option shifts preference between two others. Counter: evaluate options on their own merits.

Q: Common mitigation across biases?
A: Slow down, write down assumptions, generate alternatives, seek disconfirming data, get a second opinion.

Q: What is confirmation bias?
A: The tendency to search for, interpret, and recall information that confirms one's existing beliefs.

Q: How to counter confirmation bias?
A: Actively seek disconfirming evidence; ask "what would change my mind?"

Q: What is the anchoring effect?
A: Heavy reliance on the first piece of information offered ("the anchor") when making decisions.

Q: Classic anchoring experiment?
A: Tversky & Kahneman's wheel-of-fortune: an arbitrary number influenced subsequent estimates of African UN representation.

Q: What is the availability heuristic?
A: Judging probability by how easily examples come to mind — vivid events feel more common than they are.

Q: Example of availability heuristic?
A: Overestimating shark attack risk after seeing news coverage, despite tiny actual frequency.

Q: What is the representativeness heuristic?
A: Judging probability by similarity to a stereotype, ignoring base rates.

Q: "Linda the bank teller" example?
A: Subjects rated "Linda is a feminist bank teller" more probable than "Linda is a bank teller" — conjunction fallacy.

Q: What is the conjunction fallacy?
A: Believing two specific events are more probable than one general event — violates basic probability.

Q: What is base-rate neglect?
A: Ignoring overall frequency in favor of specific case features.

Q: What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
A: Low-skill people overestimate ability; high-skill people often underestimate theirs.

Q: Origin of Dunning-Kruger?
A: Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Cornell, 1999 — based on tests in logic, grammar, humor.

Q: What is hindsight bias?
A: After learning an outcome, believing you "knew it all along" — distorts memory of prior uncertainty.

Q: How to counter hindsight bias?
A: Write down predictions and reasoning before outcomes; review later honestly.

Q: What is survivorship bias?
A: Focusing on successful examples while ignoring failed ones, leading to false conclusions about what works.

Q: Classic survivorship bias example?
A: Abraham Wald's WWII airplane analysis — armor where returning planes weren't hit, since hits there meant non-return.

Q: What is selection bias?
A: Sample doesn't represent population because of how it was chosen — distorts inferences.

Q: What is the sunk-cost fallacy?
A: Continuing to invest in a losing project because of past investment, rather than future expected value.

Q: Real-world sunk-cost example?
A: Continuing to read a boring book because you're halfway through — past time is irrelevant to remaining value.

Q: What is loss aversion?
A: Losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains feel good (Kahneman, Tversky).

Q: Prospect theory connection?
A: Loss aversion is a core component of prospect theory — describes how people value gains vs. losses.

Q: What is the endowment effect?
A: People value something more once they own it — willingness to accept > willingness to pay.

Q: Mug experiment for endowment effect?
A: Knetsch's experiment: people demanded ~2× the price to sell a mug they'd just been given.

Q: What is status quo bias?
A: Preference for the current state of affairs; change feels riskier than staying put.

Q: What is the default effect?
A: People disproportionately choose the default option — organ donation rates differ enormously by opt-in vs. opt-out.

Q: What is choice overload?
A: Too many options decrease likelihood of choosing and satisfaction with any choice made.

Q: Sheena Iyengar's jam experiment?
A: 24 jams in a tasting display drew more browsers; 6 jams produced ~10× more purchases.

Q: What is the paradox of choice?
A: Barry Schwartz's book — more options can reduce wellbeing through regret, decision fatigue, and inflated expectations.

Q: What is the framing effect?
A: The same information can lead to different decisions depending on how it's presented.

Q: Classic framing experiment?
A: Tversky & Kahneman's "Asian disease" — same outcomes framed as gains vs. losses produced opposite choices.

Q: What is the negativity bias?
A: Negative information is processed more deeply and remembered longer than positive.

Q: What is the spotlight effect?
A: Overestimating how much others notice your appearance, mistakes, or behavior.

Q: Gilovich's spotlight experiment?
A: Subjects wearing embarrassing T-shirts thought ~46% noticed; actual was ~23%.

Q: What is the illusion of transparency?
A: Believing your internal states (nervousness, deception) are more visible to others than they are.

Q: What is fundamental attribution error?
A: Attributing others' behavior to character while attributing your own to circumstance.

Q: What is the actor-observer asymmetry?
A: You explain your behavior by situation; you explain others' behavior by personality.

Q: What is the just-world fallacy?
A: Believing the world is fundamentally fair — bad things happen to bad people, so victims must deserve it.

Q: What is the bandwagon effect?
A: Adopting beliefs or behaviors because many others have — social proof gone wild.

Q: What is groupthink?
A: Group members prioritize harmony over critical evaluation, leading to poor collective decisions.

Q: Janis's classic groupthink examples?
A: Bay of Pigs invasion, Vietnam escalation, Challenger disaster — all suffered from groupthink dynamics.

Q: What is the false consensus effect?
A: Overestimating how much others share your beliefs, preferences, or behaviors.

Q: What is the false uniqueness effect?
A: Underestimating how common your good qualities or abilities are.

Q: What is the IKEA effect?
A: People value things more when they had a hand in creating them.

Q: What is the not-invented-here syndrome?
A: Aversion to ideas, tools, or methods from outside one's group or company.

Q: What is the planning fallacy?
A: Underestimating time, costs, and risks of future actions while overestimating benefits.

Q: Why does the planning fallacy persist?
A: People focus on the specific plan rather than reference-class data from similar past projects.

Q: Reference class forecasting solution?
A: Bent Flyvbjerg: estimate based on actual outcomes of similar past projects, not bottom-up details.

Q: What is optimism bias?
A: Believing one's own future will be better than average — present in roughly 80% of people.

Q: What is the overconfidence effect?
A: Subjective confidence in one's judgments exceeds accuracy.

Q: What is the bias blind spot?
A: Recognizing biases in others while believing oneself to be relatively unbiased.

Q: What is naive realism?
A: Belief that one sees the world objectively, and disagreement comes from others' ignorance or bias.

Q: What is curse of knowledge?
A: Once you know something, hard to imagine not knowing it — leads to poor explanations for novices.

Q: What is hyperbolic discounting?
A: Preferring smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed ones, with steep early decay.

Q: Marshmallow test connection?
A: Mischel's classic study — kids who delayed gratification correlated with later outcomes (effect somewhat overstated).

Q: What is present bias?
A: Giving disproportionate weight to the immediate future over the longer term.

Q: What is the affect heuristic?
A: Letting current emotions shape judgments about risks and benefits.

Q: What is mood-congruent memory?
A: Recalling memories matching current emotional state — sad mood retrieves sad memories.

Q: What is the recency bias?
A: Overweighting recent events when forming judgments or predictions.

Q: What is primacy effect?
A: First information received disproportionately shapes overall impression.

Q: What is the halo effect?
A: One positive trait (attractiveness, friendliness) spilling into unrelated judgments (intelligence, competence).

Q: What is the horn effect?
A: Opposite of halo — one negative trait coloring all other judgments.

Q: What is the contrast effect?
A: Judgments shifted by comparison with recent stimuli — middling salary feels low after seeing high anchors.

Q: What is the decoy effect?
A: Adding a third worse option changes preference between original two — used heavily in pricing.

Q: The Economist subscription decoy?
A: Print-only at $125 made print-and-digital at $125 look like a steal — boosted that choice from 16% to 84%.

Q: What is anchoring in negotiation?
A: The first number proposed strongly influences the final agreement.

Q: First-offer effect?
A: Making the first offer typically anchors the negotiation in your favor, contrary to common advice.

Q: What is reactance?
A: Restricting choice triggers desire to restore the lost option — counter-pressure to perceived control loss.

Q: What is the Streisand effect?
A: Trying to suppress information dramatically increases attention to it.

Q: What is the boomerang effect?
A: Persuasion attempt that produces the opposite of the intended belief.

Q: What is the third-person effect?
A: Believing media or persuasion affects others more than oneself.

Q: What is naive cynicism?
A: Expecting more self-interested behavior from others than actually occurs.

Q: What is the just-noticeable-difference (JND)?
A: Weber's law — smallest perceivable difference between two stimuli, proportional to baseline.

Q: What is the peak-end rule?
A: Judgments of past experiences are dominated by peak emotion and how they ended.

Q: Kahneman's colonoscopy study?
A: Slightly extending discomfort with a milder ending led to better-rated experience — peak-end at work.

Q: What is duration neglect?
A: The length of an experience matters less than its peak intensity and ending.

Q: What is loss aversion in price changes?
A: A $5 price increase feels worse than a $5 discount feels good — frame matters.

Q: What is the zero-price effect?
A: "Free" disproportionately increases attractiveness, even when the calculation is rational.

Q: What is the certainty effect?
A: Outcomes seen as certain are overweighted relative to merely probable ones.

Q: What is ambiguity aversion (Ellsberg paradox)?
A: People prefer known risks to unknown ones, even at worse expected value.

Q: What is illusion of control?
A: Overestimating one's influence over external events, especially random ones.

Q: Why do people choose their own lottery numbers?
A: Illusion of control — picking gives a sense of influence over an entirely random outcome.

Q: What is the gambler's fallacy?
A: Believing past random events affect future probability — five reds in a row don't make black "due."

Q: What is the hot-hand fallacy?
A: Believing a streak indicates real skill or "momentum" — sometimes a real effect, often illusory.

Q: What is the gambler's fallacy of small numbers?
A: Tversky & Kahneman — expecting small samples to show statistical regularities found only in large samples.

Q: What is the conjunction fallacy in trial settings?
A: Adding specific details to a story makes it feel more plausible despite being less probable.

Q: What is the disjunction fallacy?
A: Underestimating the probability that one of several events happens — opposite of conjunction.

Q: What is regression to the mean?
A: Extreme observations tend to be followed by less extreme ones — often misread as causal effects.

Q: Sports Illustrated curse explained?
A: Cover athletes are often at performance peak; subsequent decline is regression, not jinx.

Q: What is the cluster illusion?
A: Seeing patterns in random data — assuming clumping indicates a cause.

Q: What is texas sharpshooter fallacy?
A: Drawing the target after firing — selecting data to fit a narrative.

Q: What is apophenia?
A: General tendency to see patterns, connections, or meaning in random data.

Q: What is the narrative fallacy?
A: Constructing stories to explain past events that overstate causal coherence.

Q: Taleb's narrative fallacy concern?
A: Stories that fit the past too neatly create false confidence in predicting the future.

Q: What is the illusion of explanatory depth?
A: Believing you understand how something works in more detail than you actually do — until asked to explain.

Q: What is the Forer (Barnum) effect?
A: Accepting vague, general personality descriptions as uniquely accurate — basis of horoscopes.

Q: What is the Pollyanna principle?
A: Tendency to remember pleasant information more accurately than unpleasant.

Q: What is rosy retrospection?
A: Past events recalled more positively than they were experienced.

Q: What is the impact bias?
A: Overestimating how long and how intensely future events will affect emotions.

Q: What is affective forecasting error?
A: General term for predicting future emotional states poorly — usually overestimating impact.

Q: What is the focusing illusion?
A: "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it" — Kahneman.

Q: What is the empathy gap?
A: Underestimating how much one's emotional state will differ from current state — hot-cold empathy gap.

Q: What is projection bias?
A: Assuming future preferences will be like current ones; planning meals while hungry.

Q: What is the contrast principle in pricing?
A: Sequence anchors perception — showing a $5,000 watch first makes $500 watches seem reasonable.

Q: What is psychological pricing ($.99)?
A: Just-below pricing creates perception of meaningfully lower cost via left-digit effect.

Q: What is the left-digit effect?
A: Disproportionate attention to the leftmost digit — $4.99 feels much cheaper than $5.00.

Q: What is the labor illusion?
A: Visible effort makes outcomes feel more valuable, even when no functional benefit exists.

Q: What is the Hawthorne effect?
A: Knowing one is observed changes behavior — complicates field research.

Q: What is the placebo effect?
A: Inert treatment produces real measurable effect via expectation alone.

Q: What is the nocebo effect?
A: Negative expectations produce harmful effects from neutral exposures.

Q: What is conformity bias?
A: Adjusting beliefs or behavior to match group norms — Asch line experiments demonstrated.

Q: Asch line experiment?
A: Solomon Asch showed ~75% of subjects conformed to obviously wrong group answers at least once.

Q: What is the bystander effect?
A: Presence of others reduces likelihood of any one person helping in emergency.

Q: Kitty Genovese case?
A: 1964 NYC murder that motivated bystander effect research (later, original details were partly mythologized).

Q: What is diffusion of responsibility?
A: Mechanism behind bystander effect — individual responsibility feels diluted in groups.

Q: What is obedience to authority?
A: Willingness to follow orders from perceived authority even against personal values — Milgram experiments.

Q: Milgram experiment outcomes?
A: ~65% of subjects administered the maximum apparent shock when an authority figure instructed them.

Q: What is the foot-in-the-door technique?
A: Getting compliance with small request makes larger request more likely.

Q: What is the door-in-the-face technique?
A: Make a large request expecting refusal, then a smaller request seems reasonable.

Q: What is reciprocity bias?
A: People feel obliged to return favors, even unsolicited or trivial ones.

Q: What is commitment-consistency bias?
A: People align future behavior with prior commitments, even costly ones.

Q: What is the cocktail party effect?
A: Selective attention to one stream (your name in another conversation) while ignoring others.

Q: What is inattentional blindness?
A: Failing to notice clearly visible things when focused elsewhere — the invisible gorilla experiment.

Q: Invisible gorilla experiment?
A: Simons & Chabris — ~50% of subjects watching basketball passes missed a person in a gorilla suit walking through.

Q: What is change blindness?
A: Failing to detect changes in a visual scene, especially during interruptions or transitions.

Q: What is automation bias?
A: Overrelying on automated systems even when they're wrong.

Q: What is algorithm aversion?
A: People prefer human judgment over algorithms even when algorithms perform better.

Q: Dietvorst's algorithm aversion findings?
A: Once an algorithm makes a visible error, people avoid it even if it's still better than human alternatives.

Q: What is the WYSIATI principle?
A: "What You See Is All There Is" — Kahneman; System 1 builds stories from available info, ignoring what's missing.

Q: What is the law of small numbers?
A: Treating small samples as if they represent the population — Tversky & Kahneman.

Q: What is the regression fallacy?
A: Mistaking regression to the mean for a real causal effect (e.g., punishment "working" because pilots regressed anyway).

Q: What is the conjunction effect in legal contexts?
A: Detailed criminal scenarios feel more likely than general ones, despite being mathematically less probable.

Q: What is base rate neglect in medicine?
A: Ignoring base rate of disease can dramatically misjudge meaning of positive test (Bayes failures).

Q: What is Bayes-rule failure in everyday thinking?
A: Failing to update probabilities properly when new evidence arrives — most people don't reason in Bayesian terms naturally.

Q: What is the Texas-sharpshooter fallacy in cancer clusters?
A: Identifying a cluster after the fact in random spatial data; without prior hypothesis, clusters are expected.

Q: What is the post hoc fallacy?
A: Confusing sequence for causation — B happened after A, so A caused B.

Q: What is the cum hoc fallacy?
A: Confusing correlation with causation when events occur together.

Q: What is selection effect in surveys?
A: Self-selected respondents differ systematically from non-respondents — skews findings.

Q: What is publication bias?
A: Studies with significant results more likely to be published — distorts apparent strength of evidence.

Q: What is the file-drawer problem?
A: Negative or null-result studies stay unpublished — meta-analyses can overestimate true effects.

Q: What is p-hacking?
A: Adjusting analyses until p < 0.05 — produces apparently significant results that don't replicate.

Q: What is the garden of forking paths?
A: Many small analytical choices, each defensible, that collectively raise false-positive rates.

Q: What is the replication crisis?
A: Many high-profile findings fail to replicate — calls for stricter pre-registration and methodology.

Q: What is the social desirability bias?
A: Survey respondents skew answers toward what they think is socially acceptable.

Q: What is the third-variable problem?
A: Two correlated variables may both be caused by a hidden third — apparent causal link is illusory.

Q: What is regression dilution?
A: Measurement error in predictors biases regression toward zero — important in observational studies.

Q: What is the look-elsewhere effect?
A: Searching for patterns across many tests raises false-positive risk — common in physics and finance.

Q: What is the lottery paradox (philosophy)?
A: You believe each ticket is unlikely to win, but believe one will — exposes limits of probabilistic belief.

Q: What is illusion of validity?
A: Confidence in predictions based on coherent stories, even when accuracy is low.

Q: What is the cognitive ease bias?
A: Things easier to think about feel more true — repetition, fluency, familiarity all boost perceived truth.

Q: What is the illusory truth effect?
A: Repeated false statements are rated more true with each exposure.

Q: What is the mere-exposure effect?
A: Repeated exposure to a stimulus increases preference for it.

Q: What is the Pollyanna asymmetry?
A: Positive recall outpaces accurate recall — people remember themselves as having held views consistent with current ones.

Q: What is post-decisional dissonance?
A: After making a choice, you bias evaluation to support it — reduces the discomfort of trade-off.

Q: What is the choice-supportive bias?
A: Tending to remember chosen options as better and rejected options as worse than they were at the time.

Q: What is the Ben Franklin effect?
A: A person who has done you a favor will do another more readily than someone you've done a favor for.

Q: What is the Pygmalion effect?
A: Higher expectations from authority figures lead to higher performance — self-fulfilling prophecy in classrooms.

Q: What is the Golem effect?
A: Low expectations from authority figures lead to lower performance — negative Pygmalion.

Q: What is the just-met-them effect?
A: Initial impressions of new people stick longer than they should — primacy in person perception.

Q: What is "thin slicing"?
A: Drawing accurate judgments from brief exposures — sometimes valid, sometimes biased pattern-matching.

Q: What is the cheerleader effect?
A: People appear more attractive in a group than alone — averaging effect in perception.

Q: What is "Goodhart's law" and decisions?
A: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" — metric gaming distorts decisions.

Q: What is Campbell's law?
A: Stronger version: the more a quantitative indicator is used for decision-making, the more subject it is to corruption.

Q: What is the McNamara fallacy?
A: Making decisions based solely on quantifiable factors and ignoring the immeasurable.

Q: What is the moral licensing effect?
A: Doing one good deed makes people more likely to subsequently do something selfish or unethical.

Q: What is the boomerang effect in messaging?
A: Persuasive messages that strongly conflict with beliefs can strengthen the opposing belief.

Q: What is belief perseverance?
A: Maintaining a belief even after the evidence supporting it has been discredited.

Q: What is the backfire effect?
A: Correcting misinformation can strengthen belief in it for some people, in some contexts. (Recent research suggests this is rarer than once thought.)

Q: What is the ostrich effect?
A: Avoiding negative information — checking investment portfolios less when markets fall.

Q: What is information avoidance?
A: Active choice not to learn information that might cause discomfort, even when free and useful.

Q: How do nudges leverage biases?
A: Default settings, framing, social proof, and salience all shape behavior without removing options — Thaler & Sunstein.

Q: What is libertarian paternalism?
A: Designing choice architecture that nudges better decisions while preserving freedom to choose.

Q: What is the EAST framework?
A: UK Behavioural Insights Team — Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely interventions for behavior change.

Q: What is "system 1" thinking?
A: Fast, automatic, intuitive, emotional — Kahneman's framing.

Q: What is "system 2" thinking?
A: Slow, deliberate, effortful, analytical — engages when System 1 hesitates or when prompted.

Q: Why does System 1 dominate everyday cognition?
A: Cheaper energy cost; usually accurate enough; System 2 is the lazy back-up checker.

Q: What is "thinking fast and slow" debiasing strategy?
A: Slow down deliberately for high-stakes decisions; let System 2 review System 1's conclusions.

Q: What is a checklist as a debiasing tool?
A: Forces consideration of items you might forget; Atul Gawande popularized this in medicine.

Q: What is a premortem?
A: Imagining a project has failed and writing why — surfaces risks before commitment.

Q: What is red-teaming?
A: Assigning a team to find flaws in a plan — institutional counter to confirmation bias.

Q: What is the "consider the opposite" debiasing?
A: Deliberately constructing the strongest case against your current view — reduces confirmation bias and overconfidence.

Q: What is "reference class forecasting" practically?
A: Find similar past cases, look at their actual outcomes, anchor estimate on that distribution.

Q: What is "decision journaling"?
A: Recording predictions and reasoning at decision time; reviewing later prevents hindsight bias and improves calibration.

Q: What is "calibration training"?
A: Practicing probability estimates with feedback — improves over time; used in forecasting and intelligence work.

Q: What is Tetlock's "superforecaster" finding?
A: Top forecasters share traits: open-mindedness, granular probability estimates, willingness to update.

Q: What is the "outside view" technique?
A: Solve "what would a typical [project, person, decision] do?" before solving for your specific case.

Q: What is the "inside view"?
A: Reasoning from project-specific details — usually overoptimistic without an outside-view check.

Q: What is "decoupling"?
A: Separating the merits of an argument from who's making it or how it makes you feel.

Q: What is "steel-manning"?
A: Articulating the strongest possible version of an opposing view before responding to it.

Q: What is "epistemic humility"?
A: Acknowledging the limits of your knowledge; staying open to being wrong.

Q: What is "intellectual honesty"?
A: Updating beliefs based on evidence rather than wanting them to be true.

Q: What is "the most important question" debiasing?
A: "What would I need to see to change my mind?" — clarifies whether you're reasoning or rationalizing.

Q: What is the deepest practical takeaway about biases?
A: Biases are universal — knowing about them doesn't eliminate them. Systematic processes work better than willpower.