Today, I came across this podcast with the Nobel prize Daniel Kahneman about how to make better decisions, how our judgment always has some noise, and other insights (https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/daniel-kahneman/).

I always have difficulty concentrating on listening to podcasts, but the first thing that struck me was the distinction between happiness and satisfaction.

They say that happiness has more to do with emotions and how we feel. It is more similar to a social feeling, for example, being with people we love. On the other hand, satisfaction is more related to what we think about our life, success, money, education, and prestige. In Daniel's research, he finds that people do not care much about happiness, but also at the same time that richer people are not happier, being poor also makes you miserable. The link that we usually do between money and happiness came from the idea that money is a proxy for success, but happiness and success (satisfaction) are not the same things.

Another idea that I really like on the podcast is that behavior is something difficult to change. The problem with a lot of marriages is that people always want to change the partner's behavior, by pushing them, and making them weaker - forgetting that change our own behavior is difficult. So one of the keys is to lower the expectations about the partner and be more comprehensive. Also, related to this, people have a bias called "fundamental attribution error" where people associate the behavior of someone to their personality, and this is not always true, the behavior has a lot to do with the situation. So being judgmental does not get us anywhere.

Moreover, independent clear thinking is impossible. We tend to believe in things because some people that we like told us so, or maybe because of something that happened in our life - some insults, for example. When we have an intuition about something we always have to remember that in our head there are a lot of ready-made answers, and also emotions get in the way. So, to make a decision without any noise, we should let the computers and their algorithms make decisions for us because they can make decisions without judgments. Of course, this will lead to a lot of social costs, and it is not always possible, so the podcast gave some tips to minimize this problem: "Delay your intuition. Focus on the separate points, then when you have the whole profile, you get to have an intuition and it's going to be better"

Then, the best thing to do is break up the problem into several dimensions, think and focus on each one of them separately, in this way we can see the tradeoffs more clearly and get better intuitions. If we do not do that, we have a risk to confirm our biases and tend to not get more information than we already have.

These ideas are frequently applied to investment firms that have to make a lot of decisions, but I believe that some of these can help us in daily life.