Machines can now beat humans at complex tasks that seem tailored to the strengths of the human mind, including poker, the game of Go, and visual recognition. Yet for many high-stakes decisions that are natural candidates for automated reasoning, like doctors diagnosing patients and judges setting bail, experts often favor experience and intuition over data and statistics. This reluctance to adopt formal statistical methods makes sense: Machine learning systems are difficult to design, apply, and understand. But eschewing advances in artificial intelligence can be costly. Recognizing the real-world constraints that managers and engineers face, we developed a  simple three-step procedure  for creating rubrics that improve yes-or-no decisions. These rubrics can help judges decide whom to detain, tax auditors whom to scrutinize, and hiring managers whom to interview. Our approach offers practitioners the performance of state-of-the-art machine learning while stripp...

Your days are filled with a constant stream of decisions. A study from Columbia University found that we’re bogged down by a good 70 decisions a day. Some decisions are minor, like what to eat, which route to drive to work, or in what order to tackle tasks. Others are more difficult, like deciding between two job offers, whether to move to a new city for someone you love, or whether to cut a toxic person out of your life. With so many decisions taking up each day, learning to prioritize them and make them effectively is essential to your success and happiness. While I’m familiar with many strategies successful people use for effective decision-making, what follows are the cream of the crop. They Turn Small Decisions Into Routines … Decision-making works like a muscle: as you use it over the course of the day, it gets too exhausted to function effectively. One of the best strategies successful people use to work around their decision fatigue is to eliminate smaller d...