According to LessWrong user QuietCalibration, we may learn far less from our decisions than we believe. The post highlights a persistent problem: while we can recall how excited or disappointed we felt about past choices, the actual outcomes blur with time. What sticks isn't reality—it's the narrative we construct around it. We remember the story we tell ourselves, not the evidence. This memory drift breaks our feedback loop from experience. To counter it, the author has been experimenting with decision journals that force a later reckoning: document expectations upfront, then revisit months later to compare against reality. The deeper insight: without this discipline, most 'learning from experience' is really just retroactive storytelling.

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