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by
Annie Duke
Read between
February 7 - February 12, 2018
How we figure out what—if anything—we should learn from an outcome becomes another bet.
A negative outcome could be a signal to go in and examine our decision-making. That outcome could also be due to bad luck, unrelated to our decision, in which case treating that outcome as a signal to change future decisions would be a mistake. A good outcome could signal that we made a good decision. It could also mean that we got lucky, in which case we would be making a mistake to use that outcome as a signal to repeat that decision in the future.
outcomes are rarely all skill or all luck. Even when we make the most egregious mistakes and get appropriately negative outcomes, luck plays a role. For every drunk driver who swerves into a ditch and flips his car, there are several who swerve harmlessly across multilane highways.
Just as we are almost never 100% wrong or right, outcomes are almost never 100% due to luck or skill.
MacCoun found that in single-vehicle accidents, 37% of drivers still found a way to pin the blame on someone else.
open-mindedness in considering all the possible causes of an outcome, not just the ones that flatter us.
Black-and-white thinking, uncolored by the reality of uncertainty, is a driver of both motivated reasoning and self-serving bias.
Outcomes are rarely the result of our decision quality alone or chance alone, and outcome quality is not a perfect indicator of the influence of luck or skill.
learning from watching others is just as fraught with bias.
Jean Cocteau said, “We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?”
Ideally, our happiness would depend on how things turn out for us regardless of how things turn out for anyone else.
but all he wanted to do was discuss with a fellow pro where he might have made better decisions.
Working with the way our brains are built in reshaping habit has a higher chance of success than working against it.
Treating outcome fielding as bets constantly reminds us outcomes are rarely attributable to a single cause and there is almost always uncertainty in figuring out the various causes.
You don’t have to be on the defensive side of every negative outcome because you can recognize, in addition to things you can improve, things you did well and things outside your control. You realize that not knowing is okay.
a little bit better is all we need to transform our lives.
The cumulative effect of being a little better at decision-making, like compounding interest, can have huge effects in the long run on everything that we do.
4 The Buddy System
“That raises the question, maybe you’re the problem, do you think?”
not all situations are appropriate for truthseeking, nor are all people interested in the pursuit.
I had to learn to focus on the things I could control (my own decisions), let go of the things I couldn’t (luck), and work to be able to accurately tell the difference between the two.
We don’t win bets by being in love with our own ideas. We win bets by relentlessly striving to calibrate our beliefs and predictions about the future to more accurately represent the world.
He discouraged me from confirmatory or biased thought like “I got unlucky.” He encouraged me to find things I might have control over and how to improve decisions about those.
Identifying mistakes in hands I won reinforced the separation between outcomes and decision quality.
To get a more objective view of the world, we need an environment that exposes us to alternate hypotheses and different perspectives.
to view ourselves in a more realistic way, we need other people to fill in our blind spots.
Justice Powell “prided himself on hiring liberal clerks. He would tell his clerks that the conservative side of the issues came to him naturally. Their job was to present the other side, to challenge him.
Justice Scalia, when he served on the D.C. circuit and in his early years on the Supreme Court, was known for seeking out clerks with liberal ideologies.
The more homogeneous we get, the more the group will promote and amplify confirmatory thought.
We often don’t even realize when we are in the echo chamber ourselves, because we’re so in love with our own ideas that it all just sounds sensible and right.
In political discourse, virtually everyone, even those familiar with groupthink, will assert, “I’m in the rational group exchanging ideas and thinking these things through. The people on the other side, though, are in an echo chamber.”
Social psychology is particularly vulnerable to the effects of political imbalance. Social psychologists are researching many of the hot-button issues dividing the political Left and Right: racism, sexism, stereotypes, and responses to power and authority. Coming from a community composed almost entirely of liberal-leaning scientists, the quality and impact of research can suffer. The authors identified instances in which political values became “embedded into research questions in ways that make some constructs unobservable and unmeasurable, thereby invalidating attempts at hypothesis
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They also identified the risk of researchers concentrating on topics that validated their shared narrative and avoiding topics that contested that narrative, such as stereotype accuracy and the scope and direction of prejudice.
Finally, they pointed to the obvious problem inherent in the legitimacy of research characterizing conservatives as dogmatic and intolerant done by a discipline that is over 10-to-1 liberal leaning.
Peer review, the gold standard that epitomizes the open-mindedness and hypothesis testing of the scientific method, “offers much less protection against error when the community of peers is politically homogeneous.”
expert opinion expressed as a bet was more accurate than expert opinion expressed through peer review,
People are more willing to offer their opinion when the goal is to win a bet rather than get along with people in a room.
5 Dissent to Win
CUDOS stands for Communism (data belong to the group), Universalism (apply uniform standards to claims and evidence, regardless of where they came from), Disinterestedness (vigilance against potential conflicts that can influence the group’s evaluation), and Organized Skepticism (discussion among the group to encourage engagement and dissent).
if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it:
~Richard Feynman
As a rule of thumb, if we have an urge to leave out a detail because it makes us uncomfortable or requires even more clarification to explain away, those are exactly the details we must share.
we are all our own best PR agents, spinning a narrative that shines the most flattering light on us.
I’ve encouraged companies to make sure they don’t define “winning” solely by results or providing a self-enhancing narrative. If part of corporate success consists of providing the most accurate, objective, and detailed evaluation of what’s going on, employees will compete to win on those terms. That will reward better habits of mind.
When we have a negative opinion about the person delivering the message, we close our minds to what they are saying and miss a lot of learning opportunities because of it. Likewise, when we have a positive opinion of the messenger, we tend to accept the message without much vetting. Both are bad.
The accuracy of the statement should be evaluated independent of its source.
with politics so polarized, we forget the obvious truth that no one has only good ideas or only bad ideas.
We can take this process of vetting information in the group further, initially and intentionally omitting where or whom we heard the idea from.
Telling someone how a story ends encourages them to be resulters, to interpret the details to fit that outcome.
If the outcome is known, it will bias the assessment of the decision quality to align with the outcome quality.
If the group is blind to the outcome, it produces higher fidelity evaluation of decision quality. The best way to do this is to deconstruct decisions before an outcome is known.
