Decision-Making Resources

As part of our Women in EA Seminar Series, in August, we interviewed Karolina Sarek. Karolina is co-founder and Director of Research at Charity Entrepreneurship, which helps to start high-impact charities. She also serves as a Fund Manager at the EA Animal Welfare Fund, a consultant for various EA non-profits, and a director and mentor at WANBAM. You can see her Fireside Chat on our Career Profiles page.

According to Karolina,

"If I were to recommend somebody to focus on one skill only, that definitely will be decision-making..."

Karolina has assembled a series of resources she has found particularly helpful in honing this important skill. We hope you find them useful. (And a huge thanks to Karolina for her time!)

Books

• How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas W. Hubbard: "Shows managers how to inform themselves in order to make less risky, more profitable business decisions."

• The Failure of Risk Management: Why It's Broken and How to Fix It by Douglas W. Hubbard: "Provides effective solutions to significant faults in current risk analysis methods."

• Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio: "Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals."

• Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work: Step-by-step advice on how to make better decisions by Chip and Dan Heath.

• Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients: "In Epic Measures, journalist Jeremy N. Smith offers an intimate look at Murray and his groundbreaking work. From ranking countries’ healthcare systems (the U.S. is 37th) to unearthing the shocking reality that world governments are funding developing countries at only 30% of the potential maximum efficiency when it comes to health, Epic Measures introduces a visionary leader whose unwavering determination to improve global health standards has already changed the way the world addresses issues of health and wellness, sets policy, and distributes funding."

Courses and videos

• How to make effective decisions: A Charity Entrepreneurship’s online course.

• Tools for decision making: A talk by Joey Savoie at EAGxVirtual.

• In defence of epistemic modesty: An EA Forum post by Gregory Lewis.

• How to do research that matters: A talk by Karolina Sarek at EA Global, London 2019.

Articles and blog posts

• Using a Spreadsheet to Make Good Decisions: Five Examples: An EA Forum post by Peter Hurtford.

• Value-focused thinking: A path to creative decision making: Keeney, Ralph L., and Ralph L. Keeney, Harvard University Press, 2009.

• Broaden the decision frame to make effective decisions: Handbook of principles of organizational behavior: Larrick, Richard (2009), Pages 461-480.

• Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases: by Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman, Science 185.4157 (1974): Pages 1124-1131.

• Sequence thinking vs. cluster thinking: Holden (2014), The GiveWell Blog.

• Many Weak Arguments vs. One Relatively Strong Argument: Sinick, (2013). LessWrong 2.0

• Modeling Extreme Model Uncertainty: Holden, (2014), The Give Well Blog

• Maximizing cost-effectiveness via critical inquiry: Holden, (2011), The GiveWell Blog

• Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased): Holden (2016), The Give Well Blog