Thinking in Bets Quotes

“Expressing our level of confidence also invites people to be our collaborators. As I said, most of us don’t live our lives in poker rooms, where it is more socially acceptable to challenge a peer who expresses an opinion we believe to be inaccurate to a wager. Outside of the poker room, when we declare something as 100% fact, others might be reluctant to offer up new and relevant information that would inform our beliefs for two reasons. First, they might be afraid they are wrong and so won’t speak up, worried they will be judged for that, by us or themselves. Second, even if they are very confident their information is high quality, they might be afraid of making us feel bad or judged. By saying, “I’m 80%” and thereby communicating we aren’t sure, we open the door for others to tell us what they know. They realize they can contribute without having to confront us by saying or implying, “You’re wrong.” Admitting we are not sure is an invitation for help in refining our beliefs, and that will make our beliefs much more accurate over time as we are more likely to gather relevant information.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Incorporating uncertainty into the way we think about our beliefs comes with many benefits. By expressing our level of confidence in what we believe, we are shifting our approach to how we view the world. Acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in measuring and narrowing it. Incorporating uncertainty in the way we think about what we believe creates open-mindedness, moving us closer to a more objective stance toward information that disagrees with us. We are less likely to succumb to motivated reasoning since it feels better to make small adjustments in degrees of certainty instead of having to grossly downgrade from “right” to “wrong.” When confronted with new evidence, it is a very different narrative to say, “I was 58% but now I’m 46%.” That doesn’t feel nearly as bad as “I thought I was right but now I’m wrong.” Our narrative of being a knowledgeable, educated, intelligent person who holds quality opinions isn’t compromised when we use new information to calibrate our beliefs, compared with having to make a full-on reversal. This shifts us away from treating information that disagrees with us as a threat, as something we have to defend against, making us better able to truthseek.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“We would be better served as communicators and decision-makers if we thought less about whether we are confident in our beliefs and more about how confident we are. Instead of thinking of confidence as all-or-nothing (“ I’m confident” or “I’m not confident”), our expression of our confidence would then capture all the shades of grey in between.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

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

“Surprisingly, being smart can actually make bias worse. Let me give you a different intuitive frame: the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Even when directly confronted with facts that disconfirm our beliefs, we don’t let facts get in the way. As Daniel Kahneman pointed out, we just want to think well of ourselves and feel that the narrative of our life story is a positive one. Being wrong doesn’t fit into that narrative. If we think of beliefs as only 100% right or 100% wrong, when confronting new information that might contradict our belief, we have only two options: (a) make the massive shift in our opinion of ourselves from 100% right to 100% wrong, or (b) ignore or discredit the new information. It feels bad to be wrong, so we choose (b). Information that disagrees with us is an assault on our self-narrative. We’ll work hard to swat that threat away. On the flip side, when additional information agrees with us, we effortlessly embrace it.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Flaws in forming and updating beliefs have the potential to snowball. Once a belief is lodged, it becomes difficult to dislodge. It takes on a life of its own, leading us to notice and seek out evidence confirming our belief, rarely challenge the validity of confirming evidence, and ignore or work hard to actively discredit information contradicting the belief. This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. We are constantly deciding among alternative futures: one where we go to the movies, one where we go bowling, one where we stay home. Or futures where we take a job in Des Moines, stay at our current job, or take some time away from work. Whenever we make a choice, we are betting on a potential future. We are betting that the future version of us that results from the decisions we make will be better off. At stake in a decision is that the return to us (measured in money, time, happiness, health, or whatever we value in that circumstance) will be greater than what we are giving up by betting against the other alternative future versions of us.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“No matter how far we get from the familiarity of betting at a poker table or in a casino, our decisions are always bets. We routinely decide among alternatives, put resources at risk, assess the likelihood of different outcomes, and consider what it is that we value. Every decision commits us to some course of action that, by definition, eliminates acting on other alternatives. Not placing a bet on something is, itself, a bet.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Our traditional view of betting is very narrow: casinos, sporting events, lottery tickets, wagering against someone else on the chance of a favorable outcome of some event. The definition of “bet” is much broader. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines “bet” as “a choice made by thinking about what will probably happen,” “to risk losing (something) when you try to do or achieve something” and “to make decisions that are based on the belief that something will happen or is true.” I have emphasized the broader, often overlooked, aspects of betting: choice, probability, risk, decision, belief. We can also see from this definition that betting doesn’t have to take place in a casino or against somebody else.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Although employers aren’t trying to entice employees to quit, their goal is similar in arriving at a compensation package to get the prospect to accept the offer and stay in the job. They must balance offering attractive pay and benefits with going too far and impairing their ability to make a profit. Employers also want employees to be loyal, and work long, productive hours, and maintain morale. An employer might or might not offer on-premises child care. That could encourage someone to work more hours . . . or scare off a prospective employee because it implies they may be expected to sacrifice aspects of their non-work lives. Offering paid vacation leave makes a job more attractive but, unlike offering free dining and exercise facilities, encourages them to spend time away from work. Hiring an employee, like offering a bet, is not a riskless choice. Betting on hiring the wrong person can have a huge cost (as the CEO who fired his president can attest). Recruitment costs can be substantial, and every job offer has an associated opportunity cost. This is the only person you can offer this opportunity. You might have dodged the cost of hiring Bernie Madoff, but you might have lost the benefit of hiring Bill Gates.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“When we think probabilistically, we are less likely to use adverse results alone as proof that we made a decision error, because we recognize the possibility that the decision might have been good but luck and/ or incomplete information (and a sample size of one) intervened.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Just like my spectator, Dershowitz missed the point. Any prediction that is not 0% or 100% can’t be wrong solely because the most likely future doesn’t unfold. When the 24% result happened at the final table of the charity tournament, that didn’t reflect inaccuracy about the probabilities as determined before that single outcome. Long shots hit some of the time. Blaming the oddsmakers or the odds themselves assumes that once something happens, it was bound to have happened and anyone who didn’t see it coming was wrong.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.” “I’m not sure” does not mean that there is no objective truth. Firestein’s point is, in fact, that acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in executing on our goal to get closer to what is objectively”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“But life is more like poker. You could make the smartest, most careful decision in firing a company president and still have it blow up in your face. You could run a red light and get through the intersection safely—or follow all the traffic rules and signals and end up in an accident. You could teach someone the rules of poker in five minutes, put them at a table with a world champion player, deal a hand (or several), and the novice could beat the champion. That could never happen in chess. Incomplete information poses a challenge not just for split-second decision-making, but also for learning from past decisions. Imagine my difficulty as a poker player in trying to figure out if I played a hand correctly when my opponents’ cards were never revealed. If the hand concluded after I made a bet and my opponents folded, all I know is that I won the chips. Did I play poorly and get lucky? Or did I play well?”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn’t a great model for decision-making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck. This creates a challenge that doesn’t exist in chess: identifying the relative contributions of the decisions we make versus luck in how things turn out. Poker, in contrast, is a game of incomplete information. It is a game of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty over time. (Not coincidentally, that is close to the definition of game theory.) Valuable information remains hidden. There is also an element of luck in any outcome. You could make the best possible decision at every point and still lose the hand, because you don’t know what new cards will be dealt and revealed. Once the game is finished and you try to learn from the results, separating the quality of your decisions from the influence of luck is difficult.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Chess contains no hidden information and very little luck. The pieces are all there for both players to see. Pieces can’t randomly appear or disappear from the board or get moved from one position to another by chance. No one rolls dice after which, if the roll goes against you, your bishop is taken off the board. If you lose at a game of chess, it must be because there were better moves that you didn’t make or didn’t see. You can theoretically go back and figure out exactly where you made mistakes. If one chess player is more than just a bit better than another, it is nearly inevitable the better player will win (if they are white) or, at least, draw (if they are black). On the rare occasions when a lower-ranked grand master beats a Garry Kasparov, Bobby Fischer, or Magnus Carlsen, it is because the higher-ranked player made identifiable, objective mistakes, allowing the other player to capitalize.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Bronowski quoted von Neumann’s response: “‘ No, no,’ he said. ‘Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.’” The decisions we make in our lives—in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising our children, and relationships—easily fit von Neumann’s definition of “real games.” They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception, prominent elements in poker. Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Most of what we do daily exists in automatic processing. We have habits and defaults that we rarely examine, from gripping a pencil to swerving to avoid an auto accident. The challenge is not to change the way our brains operate but to figure out how to work within the limitations of the brains we already have.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“We have this thin layer of prefrontal cortex made just for us, sitting on top of this big animal brain. Getting this thin little layer to handle more is unrealistic.” The prefrontal cortex doesn’t control most of the decisions we make every day. We can’t fundamentally get more out of that unique, thin layer of prefrontal cortex. “It’s already overtaxed,”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Making more rational decisions isn’t just a matter of willpower or consciously handling more decisions in deliberative mind. Our deliberative capacity is already maxed out. We don’t have the option, once we recognize the problem, of merely shifting the work to a different part of the brain, as if you hurt your back lifting boxes and shifted to relying on your leg muscles.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“figure out why those things happened, we are susceptible to a variety of cognitive traps, like assuming causation when there is only a correlation, or cherry-picking data to confirm the narrative we prefer. We will pound a lot of square pegs into round holes to maintain the illusion of a tight relationship between our outcomes and our decisions.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“our brains evolved to create certainty and order. We are uncomfortable with the idea that luck plays a significant role in our lives. We recognize the existence of luck, but we resist the idea that, despite our best efforts, things might not work out the way we want. It feels better for us to imagine the world as an orderly place, where randomness does not wreak havoc and things are perfectly predictable. We evolved to see the world that way. Creating order out of chaos has been necessary for our survival.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“In the exercise I do of identifying your best and worst decisions, I never seem to come across anyone who identifies a bad decision where they got lucky with the result, or a well-reasoned decision that didn’t pan out. We link results with decisions even though it is easy to point out indisputable examples where the relationship between decisions and results isn’t so perfectly correlated. No sober person thinks getting home safely after driving drunk reflects a good decision or good driving ability. Changing future decisions based on that lucky result is dangerous and unheard of (unless you are reasoning this out while drunk and obviously deluding yourself). Yet this is exactly what happened to that CEO. He changed his behavior based on the quality of the result rather than the quality of the decision-making process. He decided he drove better when he was drunk.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable. When we say, “I should have known that would happen,” or, “I should have seen it coming,” we are succumbing to hindsight bias.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Take a moment to imagine your best decision in the last year. Now take a moment to imagine your worst decision. I’m willing to bet that your best decision preceded a good result and the worst decision preceded a bad result. That is a safe bet for me because resulting isn’t just something we do from afar. Monday Morning Quarterbacks are an easy target, as are writers and bloggers providing instant analysis to a mass audience. But, as I found out from my own experiences in poker, resulting is a routine thinking pattern that bedevils all of us. Drawing an overly tight relationship between results and decision quality affects our decisions every day, potentially with far-reaching, catastrophic consequences.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“nothing”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts