Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

by Annie Duke

It’s a shame the social contract for poker players is so different than for the rest of us in this regard because a lot of good can result from someone saying, “Wanna bet?” Offering a wager brings the risk out in the open, making explicit what is already implicit (and frequently overlooked). The more we recognize that we are betting on our beliefs (with our happiness, attention, health, money, time, or some other limited resource), the more we are likely to temper our statements, getting closer to the truth as we acknowledge the risk inherent in what we believe. Expecting everyone starting to throw the gauntlet down, challenging each other to bet on any opinion, is impractical if you aren’t hanging out in a poker room. (Even in poker rooms, this generally happens only among players who know each other well.) I imagine that if you went around challenging everyone with “Wanna bet?” it would be difficult to make friends and you’d lose the ones you have. But that doesn’t mean we can’t change the framework for ourselves in the way we think about our decisions. We can train ourselves to view the world through the lens of “Wanna bet?” Once we start doing that, we are more likely to recognize that there is always a degree of uncertainty, that we are generally less sure than we thought we were, that practically nothing is black and white, 0% or 100%. And that’s a pretty good philosophy for living.