The Outside View
How looking beyond the situation in front of us tends to lead to better decisions.
I’ve been thinking about Jeremiyah Love a lot this week.
Love is the uber-talented running back from Notre Dame likely to be selected within the top 5-10 picks of tonight’s NFL draft. He’s projected to be a top pick despite consistent evidence that investing in running backs early is not a good strategy.
Every public draft analyst knows that research and has still ranked Love as one of the top players available. The argument is that he’s different from other running backs and the type of player that negates concerns over positional value.
It’s exactly the kind of situation where an outside view helps.
I was first introduced to inside and outside views from Shane Parrish at Farnam Street.1 An inside view looks at situations strictly through the task at hand, using specific details and circumstances to make decisions based on a narrow band of information that’s easily accessible. Outside views take the opposite approach, zooming out to look for similar situations that can help inform how to operate in the current context.
The inside view itself isn’t a problem; the problem comes when we only focus on the inside view. Humans are naturally biased to overemphasize unimportant details, construct narratives not supported by evidence, and overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes. We’re inherently flawed decision-makers.
And yet almost everyone defaults to the inside view. The challenge or decision is right in front of us, and everything about the situation feels unique. We immerse ourselves to understand what’s going on and select the best path(s) forward. It’s easy to miss the bias when everything looks right.
That’s where the outside view comes in. Outside views force us to think about problems as anything but unique, and find people in comparable situations to examine and learn from what they did.
We know what good decision-making looks like. It’s using the past to inform predictions, relying on large samples, incorporating a variety of perspectives, and learning as we go. These ideas are all about moving beyond specifics to consider the big picture. That’s the logic — and the benefit — of outside views.
More importantly, outside views inject a healthy dose of humility into decisions. Intentional or not, inside views are teeming with ego. It’s arrogant to think that we know better than anyone else or we can succeed where others have failed. But we all do it. We convince ourselves our situation is different.
Outside views help curb those instincts. Armed with success rates from similar situations, we can shift from arrogance to confidence — a subtle but important distinction. We’re still making decisions with conviction, only now the conviction is grounded.
If the benefits are so obvious, why doesn’t everyone use outside views? Like many things, what’s simple in theory is more challenging in practice. Stepping back means fighting human nature and biases that aren’t always noticeable. It also requires slowing things down to add time and effort.
Still, with intention, outside views can be applied in nearly any situation.
It begins with a reference class of similar situations or decisions to examine. Ideally, a group that is large enough to carry weight and specific enough to match the dynamics at play. Getting this right takes critical thinking and creativity, but with a little practice, we can assemble useful comparables to learn from. And once we get more comfortable, we can layer multiple outside views to look at problems from every angle.
Which brings us back to Jeremiyah Love. By all accounts, teams should consider Love with an early pick. He was an incredibly productive college player. He is an elite athlete that could potentially excel at multiple positions on the field. And for all the praise for his talent, people speak even more highly of his character. The information is all overwhelmingly positive.
But everything I mentioned focuses exclusively on Love. It’s specific to him and the details of his profile. It’s the inside view.
To really grapple with selecting Love, we need to go beyond those details and ask a different set of questions:
How have first-round running backs (especially those taken in the top 10) performed?
How have teams that spend top-10 picks on running backs fared?
Where do winning teams typically get their running production?
Those questions aren’t about Love. They’re about base rates, the factors surrounding the pick, and what’s happened in previous situations. And in this case, the answers tell a different story.
First round running backs have fared fine individually, but the teams that have selected them have struggled to build winning rosters around them.2 Similarly, the more successful teams of the last decade have rarely invested premium draft capital into running backs. That might not be enough to move Love down the board, but it at least warrants consideration.
Outside views don’t make decisions for us. They won’t tell us what we should or shouldn’t do. But they will provide more information and better context.
Often, that additional context improves decisions. Understanding how similar situations have played out leads to better predictions. It’s easier to give someone else advice than to follow it ourselves. Outside views allow us to step back and approach decisions from the same objective lens.
I’m not suggesting it’s wrong to take Jeremiyah Love with an early pick. I wouldn’t do it, but I understand someone coming to a different conclusion. As long as that conclusion accounts for what’s happened before.
There’s too much to learn from the past to treat any decision as unique. It may feel different. In reality, it usually isn’t.
Who was inspired by Michael Mauboussin’s book, Think Twice, and the starting point of so many decision-making frameworks, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
There have been 55 total first round running backs since 2000. 17 of those were top-10 picks. Players like LaDainian Tomlinson (5th, 2001), Adrian Peterson (7th, 2007), Todd Gurley (2015, 10th), Christian McCaffrey (8th, 2017), and Bijan Robinson (8th, 2023) have been very successful, but the overall track record is spotty and as noted, teams have note succeeded after selecting these players. If you want to dive deeper, Robert Mays and Bill Barnwell have a lot of thoughts on running back value.