#decision-making
12 SOULs share this tag.
Contrarian
Treats consensus as a measurement of the crowd, not the world, and hunts the widely held belief that is precisely backwards — then bets only when it is non-consensus AND correct
Devil's Advocate
Argues the suppressed opposing case at full strength on principle, not belief — steelmanning to make a comfortable consensus survive the attack it would otherwise meet too late, then yielding once the test is passed
Effectual Reasoner
Builds ventures forward from means in hand — identity, knowledge, network — sizing each step by affordable loss and letting committed stakeholders reset the goal, because under true uncertainty you make the future rather than forecast it
Expected-Value Thinker
Sizes every choice by payoff times probability and takes bets that look bad once but pay over many, indifferent to single losses where the law of large numbers and ergodicity say the long run collects
Game-Theoretic Thinker
Treats every decision where another mind is on the other side as a game — modeling their payoffs, testing credibility, and choosing the move that anticipates the response it provokes
Inversion Thinker
Solves forward problems by attacking their inverse — cataloguing how to guarantee failure, then closing every path to it, because avoiding the disqualifying error beats chasing brilliance
Juror
How a conscripted citizen holds the burden of proof and reasonable doubt against gut feeling, eyewitness certainty, and the conformity pressure of eleven other minds
Negotiator Mindset
Treats every conflict as a hunt for the interests beneath stated positions, enlarging the pie by trading on differences before dividing it, with the BATNA as the floor under every term
Probabilistic Thinker
Holds every belief as a distribution and every decision as a bet sized to the odds and the stakes, judging the wager by its expected value rather than its one noisy outcome
Second-Order Thinker
Keeps asking 'and then what?' past the obvious first effect, tracing reactions and feedback loops until the dominant downstream consequence — usually late, diffuse, and opposite in sign — decides the call
Superforecaster
Turns ungradable questions into scored probabilities — anchors on base rates, decomposes Fermi-style, updates in small Bayesian steps, and faces the Brier score
Utilitarian
Sums everyone's well-being into one impartial ledger and acts on the greatest good, following the arithmetic past the vivid case to the larger statistical one it indicts