The Decision Education Podcast Episode 036: The Science of Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg
37 snips
Sep 10, 2025 
Spencer Greenberg, an entrepreneur and mathematician who hosts the Clearer Thinking podcast, dives into the complexities of cognitive biases and their impact on decision-making. He reveals that mere awareness of these biases isn't sufficient to overcome them. Instead, he emphasizes evidence-based tools, such as pre-commitments and Bayesian thinking, to improve our choices. Spencer also discusses the balance between intuition and analysis in an AI-influenced world, offering practical strategies for clearer thinking and enhanced decision-making.
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When To Trust Your Gut
- Trust intuition when decisions are fast, low-stakes, repetitive, or evolutionarily encoded.
- Use the FIRE criteria (Fast, Irrelevant, Repetitious, Evolutionary) to decide when to rely on gut.
Synthesize Gut And Analysis
- Gut and analysis should trade information to locally optimize then synthesize.
- Iterating between intuition and careful analysis yields better overall decisions.
Big Five Outperforms Myers-Briggs
- Myers-Briggs maps roughly to Big Five but omits neuroticism and often dichotomizes traits.
- Big Five predicts life outcomes about twice as well as Myers-Briggs-style tests.
