What are the most common and important trade-offs that decision makers face?

A different kind of "bias-variance" tradeoff occurs in policy-making. Take college applications. One school might admit students based only on the SAT score. Another admits students based on scores, activities, essays, etc. The first school might reject a lot of exceptional people who just happen to be bad at test-taking. The second school tries to make sure they accept those kinds of exceptional people, but in the process of doing so, they will admit more unexceptional people with bad test scores who somehow manage to impress the admissions committee. The first school is "biased" against exceptional students with bad test grades-- the second school has more "variance" because by attempting to capture the students that the first school who wrongly reject, they admit more low quality students as well. You might interpret this particular example as "sensitivity vs specificity."

Another example would be a policy for splitting tips at a restaurant. One policy would be to have all the staff split the tips equally. Another policy would be to have no splitting of tips. Splitting tips incurs bias, not splitting incurs variance. An intermediary policy would be to have each staff member keep half of their own tips, and to contribute the other half to be redistributed.

I think TRIZ has multiple reasons it's not adopted as much as the benefits might imply due to multiple reasons, its Russian origin only one of some. The reason is also: heavily paywalled and most low-hanging fruits in technological innovation have be taken, thus the value of picking the remaining must be balanced against all the other efforts of a technological business.

You should look into TRIZ, which seems to be related to your idea

I hadn't heard of this and it's interesting. Thanks. In what context did you find it?

In statistics, there is a well known Bias–variance tradeoff, which affects a wide range of situations

I have it subsumed under Precision vs Simplicity; I'll make this explicit in the next iteration.

A general pattern. Some trade-offs are due to Berkson's paradox, because sometimes the situation we have is "prefiltered" by the past, and we can observe negative corellations between variables even though they are not intrinsically negatively correlated

Thanks, this is an interesting point, and one that I have thought about, see here.

r/k selection theory and quality vs quantity

I have these subsumed under Surely Some vs Maybe More; I'll make this explicit in the next iteration.

Yeah I find these three pronged trade-offs fairly interesting. I think it's wrong to say "choose two"; for example, you could always choose to be somewhere in the middle if you consider the space to be a triangle.

Do you know of the word for a three pronged trade-off?

I think that's Sensitivity vs Specificity

I was thinking build vs buy or I source vs outsource being much like some of the first point.

I think that Signaling vs Actually doing things would map to Saving vs Savoring in the typical case that you want status in the short run via signaling ("savoring") and shifting the world more towards your values if you choose to signal less ("saving").

Is this something where you're playing a game with another agent and you don't want him to predict what you'll do?

Yes, exactly. Kind of narrow, but I just find it really cool. And, lots of things decision makers have to do can be formulated as games with other agents.

I don't think those are opposite. They'll occur in tradeoffs, but only in the sense that any two things will. There's also speed vs cost, or speed vs documentation, etc.

I agree that they might not be "intrinsic", but if they're very commonly inversely correlated in situations we care about (which I think they are), then considering it as a trade-off can still be useful. See here for more.

"Risk vs Reward"

Thanks. I'll make this explicit next time. I like to have an upside connoted by both words of the trade-offs, which is why I didn't like risk vs reward.

A lot of gains that aren't constant but are variable have still nothing to do with Black Swans.

I think this is Surely Some vs Maybe More -- right? If so, helpful to recall the black swan meme and map it to this, thanks.

Good find and I agree that they are pretty similar. As I write in the text,

This trade-off [#11] can be “constructed” by considering the interaction of Some Now vs More Later [#6] and Loyalty vs Universality, where “savoring” is loyalty to oneself in the short run and “saving” is universality over the long run. However, this is a common enough interaction that it seems canon-worthy.

Do you agree?