Decision Intelligence

MasterClass differs from Coursera — these are not academic courses but lecture-workshops from people at the absolute top of their fields. For people working on decision quality, the most relevant classes are: **Daniel Kahneman** (Nobel laureate in economics for research on heuristics and biases — foundation of the whole field of decision science); **Bob Iger** (former Disney CEO, course on strategy and leading organisations through transformation); **Chris Voss** (former FBI hostage negotiator, a course on negotiation — tactically influential in business); **Howard Marks** (legendary investor at Oaktree Capital — course on thinking under uncertainty and assessing risk). MasterClass's value lies in **direct contact with experts** — these are not academic lecturers explaining how something works but practitioners explaining how they did it. Their anecdotes and concrete 'what I did in situation X' examples are often more valuable than abstract theoretical frameworks. The annual subscription ($120-240) unlocks the whole library — hundreds of classes. Approach: don't try to 'cover everything'; pick 5-7 of the most relevant classes and go deep. Realistic ROI: if these courses change even one large decision in a year (a hire, a negotiation, an investment), the return is dramatic.

Coursera has several excellent courses in decision science. The strongest picks are: **'A Crash Course in Causality'** from the University of Pennsylvania (3 weeks, fundamentals of causal inference — a key skill for avoiding the 'correlation = causation' trap); **'Behavioral Finance'** from Duke University (applying behavioural economics to investment decisions — shows how emotions sabotage financial decisions); **'Critical Thinking Skills for University Success'** from the University of Sydney (4 weeks, foundations of critical reasoning — argumentation, identifying logical fallacies); **'Model Thinking'** by Scott Page at Michigan (10 weeks — a broad spectrum of mental models: game theory, decision models, group dynamics). What distinguishes these courses from podcasts or popular-science books: rigour and exercises. Each module ends with assignments whose grading (when you pay for the certificate) forces you to actually apply the concepts, not just watch the lectures. The free audit gives access to all lectures — you can fully learn a topic without paying a dollar. The certificate makes sense if you need external motivation (a deadline) or want to add it to your CV.

Daniel Kahneman died in 2024 at the age of 90 — leaving behind one of the most influential works of 20th-century psychology. 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' is his intellectual testament — a distillation of 40 years of research on heuristics and biases (mostly with his research partner Amos Tversky, who died in 1996). The key framing: our mind has two systems. **System 1** — fast, automatic, intuitive, emotional. **System 2** — slow, deliberate, logical, lazy (because it requires energy and most of the time it lets System 1 decide). Most of our decisions are System 1's work — and most biases come from System 1 reaching conclusions that System 2 never even checks. The book documents dozens of specific biases: **anchoring** (the first number heard anchors later estimates), **availability bias** (easily-recalled things seem more frequent than they are), **loss aversion** (a loss of the same size hurts ~2x more than the joy of an equivalent gain), **base rate neglect** (we ignore general statistics in favour of concrete examples). About 18-25 hours of reading — it's long and dense. But for anyone who genuinely wants to understand why their decisions are what they are, it's canonical. I recommend the audiobook (nearly 21 hours) on long walks and trips.

If Kahneman's 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' is the academic treatment of the material, Rolf Dobelli's 'The Art of Thinking Clearly' is the **operational manual**. Dobelli (a Swiss writer and entrepreneur) presents 99 biases in very short, 3-4-page chapters. Each chapter describes one bias, gives a concrete example and usually one sentence of advice on how to avoid it. The format is nearly ideal for learning: you can read one chapter a day for 3 months and genuinely internalise the material. Full reading takes 6-8 hours. Among the biases covered: **survivorship bias** (we focus on winners and ignore losers — hence 'every rich person writes a book about how they made it, but we never hear the losers'), **confirmation bias** (we seek information confirming our opinions), **sunk cost fallacy** (we keep going with unprofitable investments because 'we've already invested so much'), **planning fallacy** (we always underestimate how long a project will take). The book is *more practical* than Kahneman — Kahneman gives theoretical foundations; Dobelli gives immediately applicable rules of thumb. Best to read both: Kahneman once forever (as a foundation), Dobelli yearly as a refresher.

The **Decision Journal** is a concept popularised by Shane Parrish (of Farnam Street) and adopted by, among others, Daniel Kahneman. The idea is simple: when you make a significant decision (professional, financial, life), you write it down in a journal — what you're deciding, why, your expectations, your mood at the moment, what information you have or lack. After 3-6-12 months you come back and check how it turned out. Why? Because **human memory is famously bad at reconstructing why we decided something**. After success we remember we 'knew it was a good idea'. After failure — that 'we had doubts'. That's not true — it's retrospective reconstruction, distorted by the outcome. A decision journal captures thinking at the zero point, *before* the result is known. It is the only way to learn from your decisions rather than from their outcomes (which also depend on luck). A physical notebook (Moleskine, Leuchtturm1917 or a dedicated Decision Journal) beats an app — it forces *slower*, more deliberate writing, which is itself part of the process. 10-15 minutes per decision is enough. After a year you have a unique dataset about your own thinking — something no coach can sell you.