Dan Levy

“When you are having trouble getting your thinking straight, consider an extreme or simple case. This will often give you the insight you need to move forward. More generally, make a problem as simple as possible without losing its essence – but no simpler. The world is full of uncertainty, much more than you think. Almost every important decision you make will be in the face of uncertainty. Therefore, learning to think probabilistically (assessing subjective probabilities of various scenarios and updating these probabilities with new information) is a critical life skill. Because of uncertainty, some good decisions will result in poor outcomes. In fact, for some decisions there are no good outcomes. Your job will be to choose the option likely to lead to the least bad outcome. Also, resist the tendency to dislike more the errors resulting from your actions (errors of commission) than the errors resulting from your inactions (errors of omission). These two types of errors are equally bad; what matters is their consequences, not their source.”
― Dan Levy, Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard Professor Richard Zeckhauser