WHY SMART PEOPLE MAKE BAD DECISIONS
Smart People, Big Mistakes
Understanding the judgment that builds — and breaks — the modern world.
★ AN OMAHAINDIA ORIGINAL ★
The people who got it catastrophically wrong were not fools. They were clever, careful and admired, and they walked in anyway. Siri takes one real case per book — a tulip, a bank, a giant that stopped looking — and asks the only question that matters: what was actually going through their heads, and would it have gone through yours?
MORAL SCIENCES FOR THE MODERN WORLD
🧠 A mind → 🎣 an incentive → 👥 a crowd → 💸 a bubble → ⚖️ a decision → 🏛️ a consequence → 📜 a rule worth keeping
The Library
25 real cases. No villains — only people, and decisions that made sense at the time. · Books 1 and 2 are free.
Book 1
Free
The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
Why smart people make terrible decisions
Free — no account needed · 25 min read
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Book 2
Free
The Incentive Trap
Show me how you're paid, and I will show you what happens next
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Book 3
The Crowd
Why does everyone believe the same thing?
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Book 4
The Ego Trap
When being right becomes more important than being correct
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Book 5
The Confirmation Machine
Why we see what we want to see
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Book 6
The Flower That Became a Fortune
Tulip Mania
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Book 7
Everyone Was Getting Rich
The South Sea Bubble
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Book 8
The Future Had Arrived
The Dot-Com Bubble
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Book 9
The House That Broke the World
The Housing Bubble
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Book 10
The Fear Machine
Bank runs, fire sales and contagion
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Book 11
The Smart People Mystery
Long-Term Capital Management
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Book 12
How a Giant Fell
Lehman Brothers
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Book 13
When the Numbers Became a Mirage
Enron
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Book 14
How Did Everyone Believe Him?
The Madoff Mystery
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Book 15
The Company That Needed Trust
Wirecard
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Book 16
When Bigger Stops Being Better
The Growth Trap
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Book 17
Borrowing From Tomorrow
The Debt Trap
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Book 18
When Vision Becomes Obsession
The Founder Trap
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Book 19
When Winning Makes You Weak
The Success Trap
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Book 20
The Kodak Question
How Can the Inventor of the Future Miss the Future?
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Book 21
Never Bet the Farm
The Margin of Safety
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Book 22
And Then What?
The Second-Order Effect
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Book 23
This Time Is Different
The Most Dangerous Four Words
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Book 24
The Human Brain's Checklist
The Mental Models
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Book 25
The Ten Commandments of the Modern World
How Not to Destroy What You Build
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Two adventures are free. 23 more are waiting.
One subscription opens every series — the whole shelf, not just this one.