Great Reviews and Terrible Tacos - Sharpening Substitute Questions with Counterfactuals
whatshot 12 snips
Jun 18, 2025
Dive into the fascinating world of substitute questions and how they can simplify complex inquiries, but often lead to biases. Explore the power of counterfactual thinking to challenge your assumptions and enhance decision-making. Learn two key techniques: asking 'what else could be true?' to uncover alternative explanations and using thought experiments to refine your personal and career goals. Discover how this approach can improve hiring processes and minimize confirmation bias in problem-solving.
23:28
forum Ask episode
web_stories AI Snips
view_agenda Chapters
auto_awesome Transcript
info_circle Episode notes
insights INSIGHT
Substitute Questions as Heuristics
We often answer hard questions by substituting easier, approximate questions without realizing it. - This heuristic can cause mismatch if the substitute question lacks cohesion with the original question.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Apply Counterfactual Thinking
Use counterfactual thinking to test the cohesion between your substitute question and the core question. - Ask "what else could be true?" to find alternative explanations and improve your heuristics.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Use Thought Experiments for Clarity
Use thought experiments to clarify your true desires and career goals. - Question assumptions like wanting a promotion without a pay raise or willingness to work long hours.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
This episode delves into the use of substitute questions—simpler queries we use to answer more complex ones—and the crucial concept of cohesion between these substitutes and our true objectives. You'll learn how to leverage counterfactual thinking to scrutinize your assumptions and enhance the effectiveness of your decisions. Discover two powerful counterfactual techniques: asking "what else could be true?" to reveal alternative explanations, and employing thought experiments to, for example, precisely define your desires and career aspirations. The discussion offers practical applications, from refining hiring processes by identifying high-cohesion interview criteria to avoiding confirmation bias in debugging. By adopting counterfactual thinking, you can significantly improve your analytical skills, make more informed choices, and build robust strategies.
Uncover how cognitively taxing questions lead us to use substitute questions as heuristics, and why understanding the cohesion between these is vital for accurate decision-making.
Learn to implement "counterfactual thinking" to rigorously check your heuristics and substitute questions, ensuring they effectively align with your actual goals and underlying evaluations.
Discover two key counterfactual techniques: exploring "what else could be true?" to identify alternative explanations for observations, and conducting thought experiments to clarify nuanced personal and professional desires.
Explore practical applications of counterfactuals to drastically improve processes like hiring, by challenging low-signal interview criteria (e.g., LeetCode problems) and making more predictive assessments of candidates.
Understand how counterfactuals can combat biases like confirmation bias in problem-solving, such as debugging, by prompting you to consider alternative causes and avoid poor pathways of biased logic.
Realise the transformative power of counterfactual thinking in refining your thinking process, improving your career trajectory, and enhancing departmental operations by identifying and improving low-cohesion substitutions.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com..
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
Developer Tea