Life often turns out to be too complicated to fit into a human brain. If you’ve ever tried to choose from fifty flavors of ice cream, or to decide whether to buy a house, you know what I mean.

Humans tend to make complex decisions based on simplified models called heuristics. Heuristics sometimes turn out to lack important factors, be biased, or hard to explain. Often, that’s fine - the stakes are low, you don’t have time and no one needs to understand your reasoning (e.g., choosing from fifty flavors of ice cream). “Necessary Claims'' is for the cases where a high risk of being incomplete, biased or hard to explain isn’t fine: Stakes are high, and you may need to involve others in your decision (e.g., buying a house).

Breaking down a decision into necessary claims helps to not overlook important factors, and it gives you a story to tell. In the beginning, your story might sound like “we will probably decide this way, if x turns out to be true and y turns out to be false”. And later on, it will change to “we have decided this way, because we are highly confident that x is true and somewhat confident that y is false”.

Note that this technique formalizes a process that may seem obvious to some people. To me, it was hugely helpful to think about it explicitly and use it systematically, and I hope it will be to others, too. It also builds on several techniques taught by CFAR, although I am not officially affiliated with CFAR, this post reflects my personal experience and opinions and all mistakes are my own. I'm grateful to Elizabeth Garrett and Kyle Scott for feedback on an initial draft.

In a nutshell

To make a decision, you list all the necessary claims that would need to be true for you to decide one way. You also list your confidence that each claim is true. You then do analyses to support (or refute) those claims, until your aggregate confidence is high enough to decide.

Description of the technique, using an example

Say you and your partner are considering buying a house in the city you live in. Houses are expensive, so this is high-stakes, and you pool your money, so you want to decide together. You are aware that this decision will take up a few of your Saturdays, and decide to invest the time. First, you agree on the decision you want to make: “Should we buy a house here and now?”

If you have trouble defining the decision at this step, you might co...

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