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Graeme Newell's Reviews > Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
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I really enjoyed this book. The author, Annie Duke, is a famous professional poker player. She has spent her life sitting around a poker table attempting to predict how chance and human behavior will coalesce to influence outcomes. This has given her a delightfully refreshing vantage point on the fallibilities of decision making.
Most of us vastly underestimate the role that good and bad luck play in the outcomes of our daily lives. Duke points out that we want to believe we are firmly in control of our own destinies; however, there is a huge amount of luck in most of the major decisions of our lives.
When things go our way, we attribute the win to our own prowess; however, when things go wrong, we typically blame others or bad luck.
For example, we start a new business and succeed wonderfully. We will attribute it to our entrepreneurial mastery, when in fact it might have just been good timing, when a competitor happened to stumble at that very moment. Someone makes the decision to drive drunk and happens to make the journey when few cars are on the road. He ends up getting home just fine because fate smiled on him.
Just as in poker, Duke shows us that sometimes we make very smart, capable decisions, but we still lose. A smart poker player should bet big on a good hand because the odds are in her favor. However, this does not change the fact that she can still lose because luck may give her competitor better cards. The same is true in our own lives.
When decisions don’t go as we hope, we tend to lament the choice me made. In fact, the choice may have been a very good one, but luck wasn’t on our side, and we still lost. That doesn’t change the fact that we made the right choice at that time. Hindsight tends to make us doubt our judgment despite the fact that our thinking may have been quite sound.
It is important to remember that a 90% probability of success means we still lose 10% of the time. Humans tend to minimize this losing chance.
Pundits pummeled the pollsters after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. They decried that the pollsters were completely wrong. The pollsters actually got it right. Donald Trump had a 30% chance of winning and his number just came up. All pollsters’ predictions are a bell curve, not a black or white choice. The same is true of the decisions in our own lives.
In this book Duke teaches us to escape the win/lose mindset and think in percentages of success. She shows how to minimize our own very natural inclination to blame others and the fates for our failures. Duke lays out a step-by-step plan to nurture our ability to see the downside of risk BEFORE we make our bet. She shows us how to optimize our assessment of the odds, thus better anticipating future obstacles and increasing our chance at success in the end.
This is a very well written book with an approachable, conversational style. Duke introduces us to some great new thinking and a vantage point that is refreshingly insightful. I learned a lot.
Most of us vastly underestimate the role that good and bad luck play in the outcomes of our daily lives. Duke points out that we want to believe we are firmly in control of our own destinies; however, there is a huge amount of luck in most of the major decisions of our lives.
When things go our way, we attribute the win to our own prowess; however, when things go wrong, we typically blame others or bad luck.
For example, we start a new business and succeed wonderfully. We will attribute it to our entrepreneurial mastery, when in fact it might have just been good timing, when a competitor happened to stumble at that very moment. Someone makes the decision to drive drunk and happens to make the journey when few cars are on the road. He ends up getting home just fine because fate smiled on him.
Just as in poker, Duke shows us that sometimes we make very smart, capable decisions, but we still lose. A smart poker player should bet big on a good hand because the odds are in her favor. However, this does not change the fact that she can still lose because luck may give her competitor better cards. The same is true in our own lives.
When decisions don’t go as we hope, we tend to lament the choice me made. In fact, the choice may have been a very good one, but luck wasn’t on our side, and we still lost. That doesn’t change the fact that we made the right choice at that time. Hindsight tends to make us doubt our judgment despite the fact that our thinking may have been quite sound.
It is important to remember that a 90% probability of success means we still lose 10% of the time. Humans tend to minimize this losing chance.
Pundits pummeled the pollsters after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. They decried that the pollsters were completely wrong. The pollsters actually got it right. Donald Trump had a 30% chance of winning and his number just came up. All pollsters’ predictions are a bell curve, not a black or white choice. The same is true of the decisions in our own lives.
In this book Duke teaches us to escape the win/lose mindset and think in percentages of success. She shows how to minimize our own very natural inclination to blame others and the fates for our failures. Duke lays out a step-by-step plan to nurture our ability to see the downside of risk BEFORE we make our bet. She shows us how to optimize our assessment of the odds, thus better anticipating future obstacles and increasing our chance at success in the end.
This is a very well written book with an approachable, conversational style. Duke introduces us to some great new thinking and a vantage point that is refreshingly insightful. I learned a lot.
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