When more information hurts decisions, switch to testable bets

A common intuition says that more information leads to better decisions. In practice, past a modest threshold, extra information often amplifies confidence more than accuracy. There’s a famous finding from professional prediction tasks: after a small amount of data, forecasters’ correctness flatlines while their certainty keeps climbing. You’ve probably felt this—five tabs in, you were thoughtful; by tab thirty, you were certain.

One product lead recognized this pattern in herself. She set an information budget of three hours for vendor research and wrote her belief as a bet: “I’m 60% confident vendor A will outperform B on support response time and integration reliability.” Then she designed a small, risky test that could make her wrong: a one‑week pilot with five real tickets, timed and scored against a checklist. Her tea went cold as she wrote it, but the plan felt clean.

A week later, the surprising result: vendor B responded faster with fewer handoffs. She updated her odds and chose B, recording the lesson: glossy demos hid support bottlenecks, so future evaluations would include real tickets. She didn’t become omniscient. She became iterative.

Structurally, this approach works because it limits information to reduce overconfidence, forces you to encode your belief in numbers (which combats hindsight bias), and builds in falsifiability so your test can actually teach you. Updating odds after a time‑boxed experiment is Bayesian thinking in plain clothes: prior, likelihood, posterior. When you repeat this loop, your accuracy improves without drowning in data. More important, your decisions speed up.

Before your next choice, set an information budget—how many sources or hours you’ll allow—then write your belief as a simple bet with odds. Design a small test with a metric and time window that could prove you wrong, run it, and afterward update your odds and capture the lesson. Keep the loop tight enough to avoid analysis paralysis. Use this on one decision this week.