Thinking in Bets Quotes

“The promise of this book is that if we follow the example of poker players by making explicit that our decisions are bets, we can make better decisions and anticipate (and take protective measures) when irrationality is likely to keep us from acting in our best interest.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Third, ask for a temporary agreement to engage in truthseeking. If someone is off-loading emotion to us, we can ask them if they are just looking to vent or if they are looking for advice. If they aren’t looking for advice, that’s fine. The rules of engagement have been made clear. Sometimes, people just want to vent. I certainly do. It’s in our nature. We want to be supportive of the people around us, and that includes comforting them when they just need some understanding and sympathy. But sometimes they’ll say they are looking for advice, and that is potentially an agreement to opt in to some truthseeking. (Even then, tread lightly because people may say they want advice when what they really want is to be affirmed.)”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Poker players live in a world where that risk is made explicit. They can get comfortable with uncertainty because they put it up front in their decisions. Ignoring the risk and uncertainty in every decision might make us feel better in the short run, but the cost to the quality of our decision-making can be immense. If we can find ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty, we can see the world more accurately and be better for it.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“The same thing happened after Donald Trump won the presidency. There was a huge outcry about the polls being wrong. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, drew a lot of that criticism. But he never said Clinton was a sure thing. Based on his aggregation and weighting of polling data, he had Trump between 30% and 40% to win (approximately between two-to-one and three-to-two against) in the week before the election. An event predicted to happen 30% to 40% of the time will happen a lot.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“habit Phil Ivey is one of those guys who can easily admit when he could have done better. Ivey is one of the world’s best poker players, a player almost universally admired by other professional poker players for his exceptional skill and confidence in his game. Starting in his early twenties, he built a reputation as a top cash-game player, a top tournament player, a top heads-up player, a top mixed-game player—a top player in every form and format of poker. In a profession where, as I’ve explained, most people are awash in self-serving bias, Phil Ivey is an exception. In 2004, my brother provided televised final-table commentary for a tournament in which Phil Ivey smoked a star-studded final table. After his win, the two of them went to a restaurant for dinner, during which Ivey deconstructed every potential playing error he thought he might have made on the way to victory, asking my brother’s opinion about each strategic decision. A more run-of-the-mill player might have spent the time talking about how great they played, relishing the victory. Not Ivey. For him, the opportunity to learn from his mistakes was much more important than treating that dinner as a self-satisfying celebration. He earned a half-million dollars and won a lengthy poker tournament over world-class competition, but all he wanted to do was discuss with a fellow pro where he might have made better decisions. I heard an identical story secondhand about Ivey at another otherwise celebratory dinner following one of his now ten World Series of Poker victories. Again, from what I understand, he spent the evening discussing in intricate detail with some other pros the points in hands where he could have made better decisions. Phil Ivey, clearly, has different habits than most poker players—and most people in any endeavor—in how he fields his outcomes.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Whether it is the forming of a group of friends or a pod at work—or hiring for diversity of viewpoint and tolerance for dissent when you are able to guide an enterprise’s culture toward accuracy—we should guard against gravitating toward clones of ourselves. We should also recognize that it’s really hard: the norm is toward homogeneity; we’re all guilty of it; and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Once we are in a group that regularly reinforces exploratory thought, the routine becomes reflexive, running on its own. Exploratory thought becomes a new habit of mind, the new routine, and one that is self-reinforced.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“As Nietzsche points out, regret can do nothing to change what has already happened. We just wallow in remorse about something over which we no longer have any control. But if regret happened before a decision instead of after, the experience of regret might get us to change a choice likely to result in a bad outcome.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“We know from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on loss aversion, part of prospect theory (which won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), that losses in general feel about two times as bad as wins feel good. So winning $100 at blackjack feels as good to us as losing $50 feels bad to us. Because being right feels like winning and being wrong feels like losing, that means we need two favorable results for every one unfavorable result just to break even emotionally. Why not live a smoother existence, without the swings, especially when the losses affect us more intensely than the wins?”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“I don’t know” is not a failure but a necessary step toward enlightenment.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“What I’ve generally found is that two people whose positions on an issue are far apart will move toward the middle after a debate or skilled explanation of the opposing position. Engaging in this type of exchange creates an understanding of and appreciation for other points of view much deeper and more powerful than just listening to the other perspective. Ultimately, it gives us a deeper understanding of our own position.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“By communicating our own uncertainty when sharing beliefs with others, we are inviting the people in our lives to act like scientists with us. This advances our beliefs at a faster clip because we miss out on fewer opportunities to get new information, information that would help us to calibrate the beliefs we have.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Acknowledging that decisions are bets based on our beliefs, getting comfortable with uncertainty, and redefining right and wrong are integral to a good overall approach to decision-making.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“How do I know this? Where did I get this information? Who did I get it from? What is the quality of my sources? How much do I trust them? How up to date is my information? How much information do I have that is relevant to the belief? What other things like this have I been confident about that turned out not to be true? What are the other plausible alternatives? What do I know about the person challenging my belief? What is their view of how credible my opinion is? What do they know that I don’t know? What is their level of expertise? What am I missing?”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“poker table a unique laboratory for studying decision-making.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Business journalist and author Suzy Welch developed a popular tool known as 10-10-10 that has the effect of bringing future-us into more of our in-the-moment decisions. “Every 10-10-10 process starts with a question. . . . [W]hat are the consequences of each of my options in ten minutes? In ten months? In ten years?” This set of questions triggers mental time travel that cues that accountability conversation (also encouraged by a truthseeking decision group).”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“When you ask people if they would rather earn $70,000 in 1900 or $70,000 now, a significant number choose 1900. True, the average yearly income in 1900 was about $450. So we’d be doing phenomenally well compared to our peers from 1900. But no amount of money in 1900 could buy Novocain or antibiotics or a refrigerator or air-conditioning or a powerful computer we could hold in one hand. About the only thing $70,000 bought in 1900 that it couldn’t buy today was the opportunity to soar above most everyone else. We’d rather lap the field in 1900 with an average life expectancy of only forty-seven years than sit in the middle of the pack now with an average life expectancy of over seventy-six years (and a computer in our palm). A”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“We bet on our beliefs. We don’t vet those beliefs well before we form them. We stubbornly refuse to update our beliefs. Now I’ve piled on by telling you that being smart doesn’t help—and can make it worse.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Lyer”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Daniel Kahneman used the famous Müller-Lyer illusion to illustrate this.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Müller-Lyer illusion to illustrate this.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“consult”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Drawing”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“One of the things poker teaches is that we have to take satisfaction in assessing the probabilities of different outcomes given the decisions under consideration and in executing the bet we think is best. With the constant stream of decisions and outcomes under uncertain conditions, you get used to losing a lot. To some degree, we’re all outcome junkies, but the more we wean ourselves from that addiction, the happier we’ll be. None of us is guaranteed a favorable outcome, and we’re all going to experience plenty of unfavorable ones. We can always, however, make a good bet. And even when we make a bad bet, we usually get a second chance because we can learn from the experience and make a better bet the next time.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“When we see how much negative space there really is, we shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects our naturally optimistic nature.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“when we backcast and imagine the things that went right, we reveal the problems if those things didn’t go right. Backcasting doesn’t, therefore, ignore the negative space so much as it overrepresents the positive space. It’s in our optimistic nature (and natural in backcasting) to imagine a successful future. Without a premortem, we don’t see as many paths to the future in which we don’t reach our goals. A premortem forces us to build out that side of the tree where things don’t work out. In the process, we are likely to realize that’s a pretty robust part of the tree. Remember, the likelihood of positive and negative futures must add up to 100%. The positive space of backcasting and the negative space of a premortem still have to fit in a finite amount of space.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Conducting a premortem creates a path to act as our own red team. Once we frame the exercise as “Okay, we failed. Why did we fail?” that frees everyone to identify potential points of failure they otherwise might not see or might not bring up for fear of being viewed as a naysayer. People can express their reservations without it sounding like they’re saying the planned course of action is wrong. Because of that, a planning process that includes a premortem creates a much healthier organization because it means that the people who do have dissenting opinions are represented in the planning.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“A premortem is an implementation of the Mertonian norm of organized skepticism, changing the rules of the game to give permission for dissent. Being a team player in a premortem isn’t about being the most enthusiastic cheerleader; it’s about being the most productive heckler. “Winning” isn’t about the group feeling good because everyone confirms their (and the organization’s) narrative that things are going to turn out great. The premortem starts with working backward from an unfavorable future, or failure to achieve a goal, so competing for favor, or feeling good about contributing to the process, is about coming up with the most creative, relevant, and actionable reasons for why things didn’t work out.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“For the company with the three-year plan to double market share, the premortem headline is “Company Fails to Reach Market Share Goal; Growth Again Stalls.” Members of the planning team now imagine delays in new products, loss of key executives or sales or marketing or technical personnel, new products by competitors, adverse economic developments, paradigm shifts that could lead customers to do without the product or rely on alternatives not on the market or in use, etc.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts