Too Helpful to Think: The Hidden Cost of AI In Your Major Life Decisions

I get really worried about how many decisions we make in ChatGPT.

Not because I think we are getting dumber (yes I know about that viral paper and I get into it a little bit below). No. Because I think most of us take the fancy business words we get out of ChatGPT at the drop of a hat and we naturally assume that if it can write business plans and ROI calculations and provide detailed rationales at the drop of a hat then it must be immediately helpful at making good decisions.

But it’s not! And decisions really matter. We make something like ~35k a day and of course most of those don’t matter (although my spoon of peanut butter for lunch was not a great decision).

But we make about 10 or so a year that matter (I explain how I got that number below), and because so many of us talk to our LLM of choice about our lives, we often have that LLM in the room making those decisions.

As an example: I’ve absolutely used Deep Research to run comparisons between schools in our district, and I find myself using AI more in those kinds of situations because the stakes are higher.

I’m right about the stakes being higher, but I find unless I’m careful using AI in that situation can actually increase the odds I make an incorrect choice. Not because the LLM is misaligned and means to lead me astray. Or because I’m lazy. No, it’s because the LLM is helpful!

And that’s a big problem. Fortunately it’s one we have some techniques to fix, but it’s a massive issue. Dive in below to find eight specific prompts and techniques for how to improve those ~10 or so massively important decisions in your life. You’ll also get:

• a detailed explanation of why LLMs are like this

• a couple of notes on that paper that’s been making the rounds saying our brains are friend on ChatGPT (friends, we’re not fried and I’ll tell you why)

• my favorite decision book

And you’ll walk a way with a sense of how to get to better decisioning habits with both AI and human colleagues. My goal is simple: your next decision is smarter and more correct because you read this post!