How do you make the right decision? How do you make an informed decision? Does this decision limit my downside (or upside)? Does it even matter?

Making decisions is a skill, and it is practiced day in and day out. Deciding your breakfast order, your route to work if the buses are cancelled, or what you would do if you were witness someone having an accident. These thoughts can be described as intuition, second nature, or a gut feeling. These feelings also apply even in unknown or new scenarios.

Thankfully, strong decision making can be developed through intentional means.

By leveraging your past experience, the experience of others, and mapping experiences in one domain to another, decision making can be developed.

Learning through feedback loops is a core feature of our midns which influence our day-do-day decision making. This starts from when we are young, understanding that throwing a ball at a window will result in a broken window, or ice melts if you leave it alone long enough. We are never born with this knowledge and must extract it from our experience.

Over your years you will develop a sense for materials that break easily (glass, ceramics), and those which do not (bricks, steel), which directly informs if you should throw a ball at it.

The 'strength' of learning from an experience varies from case to case. Something learnt while experiencing a strong negative will 'stick' more as opposed to something you learn while alone.

As social animals we would not have reached our point in civilisations if we did not share experiences. Hunter-gatherers would have shared experiences with one another, where is best to forage, where is best to hunt, what you should avoid hunting, amongst other ideas. Today we share our favourite recipes, our experiences with other people, and how best to approach evermore complex social dynamics.

Inference allows us to leverage the experience of others and update our understanding of what works, what does not, and what to do in a given scenario (even if a completely new scenario).

A very fortunate truth is that inference is not solely reliant on those around us. Forums, social media, and most importantly books are all mediums which grant insights into the experience of others. For someone looking to develop a fundamental understanding of evolution might look to Wallace's and Darwin's work, for economics Smith and Marx should be of interest.

By using the experience of those who fundamentally defined their subject-matter, you too can also develop a first-principles approach to decision making.

Cross-domain decision making is a result of an intimate understanding how a set of inputs map onto a set of outcomes. Taking basketball as an example, the set of inputs includes: how hard the ball is thrown, at which angle it is thrown, the size/weight of the ball. These map onto outcomes that can be interrogated with questions like: how far the ball goes, does it reach the target, if not, why not?

If a basketball player was to pick up another sport, say handball, despite the difference in the size, weight, and material of the balls, a basketball player will have an easier time judging how to throw the ball to reach the intended target compared to someone who has played neither sport.

Another example can be taken from Sun Tzu's Art of War. Although a book about war, modern translations provide an introduction which inform the reader that the lessons learnt from the book can and should be applied to real life environments (work, relationships, etc.). These lessons include understanding your environment, knowing when to share information, and how to navigate unfavorable situations.

Although discernment is defined at the start of this piece, I intentionally refrained from using it throughout the piece. It forced me to be more considerate about what I write as opposed to using the word discernment.

I also want you, the reader, to have an understanding of what discernment is, and that is more achievable when the word isn't used over and over.