# Highest order bit Abstractly, the highest order bit is the piece of information in a decision that, if different, would make the biggest change to what action you would take. It’s a useful frame when making an extremely multivariate decision — instead of trying to do some weird optimization, if you can identify the ‘highest order bit’ you can just focus on getting that right. As a mental model, highest order bits are similar to [[Binding Constraint]]s. [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Highest+order+bit) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Highest+order+bit)