The essay is, for me, the most honest form. Fiction lets you hide behind character; poetry behind image. But the essay asks you to stand in the light and think — slowly, carefully, in public. I write essays when a question will not leave me alone.
The pieces below are from my LinkedIn newsletter, Decisions, Data & Science — a series that sits at the intersection of how we think, what the data actually says, and what it means to make better decisions in a world increasingly shaped by AI.
From the Newsletter
The Framing Effect: Why Identical Choices Feel Completely Different
The Framing Effect: Why Identical Choices Feel Completely Different
A behavioral economics essay exploring how language rewires decision-making.
Read the full essay on LinkedIn
The Invisible Force Shaping Your Decisions
Picture this: 60 people, randomly assembled, asked what they’d pay for a premium smart ring. Before answering, they were asked to recall the last three digits of their phone number. That one irrelevant prompt — a number with no connection to price — shifted offers by 11%. This is anchoring bias in action. And it is just one of the many invisible forces — alongside confirmation bias, sunk cost fallacy, and status quo bias — that shape our decisions before we even begin to deliberate. Our brains evolved for speed, not accuracy. The question is whether we can learn to slow down when it matters.
How Our Brain Perceives Goal Setting
We set goals the way we set clocks — with false confidence in our ability to predict where we’ll be. This essay looks at the cognitive science behind how the brain frames ambition, why our mental models of progress are systematically miscalibrated, and what that means for the way we plan.
Data Science in the World of AI
As large language models absorb more of what was once called “data science”, the question worth asking is not what AI can do — but what it still cannot. This essay examines where the discipline stands, what is being automated away, and what endures as distinctly human work.
The Need to Zoom Out
Most bad decisions are not made with bad data — they are made with good data, viewed too close. This essay is about the discipline of stepping back: why perspective is not a soft skill but a cognitive one, and how the act of zooming out changes not just what you see, but what you decide.
All essays are part of the Decisions, Data & Science newsletter on LinkedIn.
Rohit Pruthi 