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16 Comments

How to make good decisions? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Good decision making in extremely important for one's business, career and life in general. Is there a way to be certain about the choice to make?
What if I tell you there is a 250+-year-old theorem that can help.

Bayes' theorem 🌈
How to make good decisions?

I know you all must be thinking that why the hell I would do all this complex math to make decisions. Well, the truth is you don't always have to.

To put this theorem in a simpler term, degree of belief, expressed as a probability should rationally change to account for the availability of related evidence. Means that with each new pieces of information the probability will change. For example, Your son tells you that he going out with a friend, you can believe that he going with a guy as 90% of his friends are male. But the believe can change if he tells that his friend has long blonde hair. We all do this subconsciously in everyday life, Human brains are naturally capable of doing this. Here are some pointers based on Bayes' theorem to improve your decision-making skills for your business or startup.

  • 🧘‍♀️ Learn from your past decisions reflect on them write down what went right and what went wrong.
  • 📰 Read both about successes and failures of other businesses to learn about all the possibilities.
  • 💪🏼 Know that low probability doesn't mean it won't happen, it's means chances of it happening is low. So prepare in advance for both successes and failures.
  • 🗄️ If you have data use it, move analytically with help of data. Your intuition might not be always right.

So that's it if you want to dive deep into Bayes' theorem check out this "You Know I’m All About that Bayes" and if you some other way of making decisions share in comment sections. 👇🏼

In case you want to chit chat, ping me on Twitter. Hope you liked it, See you next time till then

  1. 4

    Nice post! I litteraly didn't know about this theorem. To make good decisions, I usually stick to listing the pros and the cons and forecast the consequences of my decisions. Obviously, the more you take good decisions, the more you feel confident. But it's ok to fail sometimes :)

    1. 2

      There's a section in Blink (by Malcolm Gladwell) about a well-known experiment that shows people have the ability to sub-consciously "know what is right" before the higher brain has caught up.

      In other words, listening to your gut is backed by Science :)

    2. 1

      Yes failure are important too.

  2. 4

    That was a really cool observation Sarthak. We often ignore how most simple things are sometimes governed by a logical underlying principle. Kudos for sharing 🔥

    1. 3

      Thanks Manpreet ✨✨

  3. 2

    Great way to apply Bayem's theory to personal decision.

  4. 1

    Wow Amazing!! This is something new

    1. 1

      Glad you liked it. 😊

  5. 1

    P(A|B) is just probability of occurrence right.

    To make an objective decision you can factor in reward, to give an expected return.
    But that assumes experiment runs ad infinitum, whereas in life you have limited shots. So a 99% chance of "enough" is better than a 1% chance of "billions" for the individual.

    Hmm, maybe coin tossing has its place!

    1. 1

      P(A|B) means probability of A given B is true.

      1. 1

        Yeah I know ...

        It's the probability that A occurs given B has occurred.

        And it's a distribution not a point ... but my point was probability alone not enough to make decisions, Bayes or otherwise.

        You need to factor in reward (aka gain, cost, etc).

        But that is also usually too simplistic an approach as takes expected value when you may only have 1 shot (or at least limited shots).

        You asked for comments on decision making.

  6. 1

    Yet most of the people can't make good decisions... for example here is my mobile game, it and it still didn't go viral: https://www.locospartygame.net

    But it's hard to decide because of my bad decisions or because of the people's decision of not downloading it? What do you think sensei?

    1. 1

      Hahaha great way to market it. 😂😂

  7. -2

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