Thinking in Bets Quotes

“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

“was a 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

“（Daniel Gilbert）出版過一本著名的書《快樂為什麼不幸福？》（Stumbling on Happiness，”
― Annie Duke, 高勝算決策: 如何在面對決定時，降低失誤，每次出手成功率都比對手高？

“In 2012, psychologists Richard West, Russell Meserve, and Keith Stanovich tested the blind-spot bias—an irrationality where people are better at recognizing biased reasoning in others but are blind to bias in themselves. Overall, their work supported, across a variety of cognitive biases, that, yes, we all have a blind spot about recognizing our biases. The surprise is that blind-spot bias is greater the smarter you are. The researchers tested subjects for seven cognitive biases and found that cognitive ability did not attenuate the blind spot. “Furthermore, people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” In fact, in six of the seven biases tested, “more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” (Emphasis added.) They have since replicated this result. Dan Kahan’s work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias—and may even be more susceptible. He and several colleagues looked at whether conclusions from objective data were driven by subjective pre-existing beliefs on a topic. When subjects were asked to analyze complex data on an experimental skin treatment (a “neutral” topic), their ability to interpret the data and reach a conclusion depended, as expected, on their numeracy (mathematical aptitude) rather than their opinions on skin cream (since they really had no opinions on the topic). More numerate subjects did a better job at figuring out whether the data showed that the skin treatment increased or decreased the incidence of rashes. (The data were made up, and for half the subjects, the results were reversed, so the correct or incorrect answer depended on using the data, not the actual effectiveness of a particular skin treatment.) When the researchers kept the data the same but substituted “concealed-weapons bans” for “skin treatment” and “crime” for “rashes,” now the subjects’ opinions on those topics drove how subjects analyzed the exact same data. Subjects who identified as “Democrat” or “liberal” interpreted the data in a way supporting their political belief (gun control reduces crime). The “Republican” or “conservative” subjects interpreted the same data to support their opposing belief (gun control increases crime). That generally fits what we understand about motivated reasoning. The surprise, though, was Kahan’s finding about subjects with differing math skills and the same political beliefs. He discovered that the more numerate people (whether pro- or anti-gun) made more mistakes interpreting the data on the emotionally charged topic than the less numerate subjects sharing those same beliefs. “This pattern of polarization . . . does not abate among high-Numeracy subjects. Indeed, it increases.” (Emphasis in original.) It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“What good poker players and good decision-makers have in common is their comfort with the world being an uncertain and unpredictable place. They understand that they can almost never know exactly how something will turn out. They embrace that uncertainty and, instead of focusing on being sure, they try to figure out how unsure they are, making their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur. The accuracy of those guesses will depend on how much information they have and how experienced they are at making such guesses. This is part of the basis of all bets.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“There is always opportunity cost in choosing one path over others. The betting elements of decisions—choice, probability, risk, etc.—are more obvious in some situations than others. Investments are clearly bets. A decision about a stock (buy, don’t buy, sell, hold, not to mention esoteric investment options) involves a choice about the best use of financial resources. Incomplete information and factors outside of our control make all our investment choices uncertain. We evaluate what we can, figure out what we think will maximize our investment money, and execute. Deciding not to invest or not to sell a stock, likewise, is a bet. These are the same decisions I make during a hand of poker: fold, check, call, bet, or raise.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Whenever we choose an alternative (whether it is taking a new job or moving to Des Moines for month), we are automatically rejecting every other possible choice. All those rejected alternatives are paths to possible futures where things could be better or worse than the path we chose. There is potential opportunity cost in any choice we forgo.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“—to come up with ways a decision or plan can go bad, so the team can anticipate and account for them.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Gabriele Oettingen, professor of psychology at NYU and author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation, has conducted over twenty years of research, consistently finding that people who imagine obstacles in the way of reaching their goals are more likely to achieve success, a process she has called “mental contrasting.” Her first study, of women enrolled in a weight-loss program, found that subjects “who had strong positive fantasies about slimming down . . . lost twenty-four pounds less than those who pictured themselves more negatively.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“If our goal is to lose twenty pounds in six months, we can plan how to achieve that by imagining it’s six months from now and we’ve lost the weight. What are the things we did to lose the weight? How did we avoid junk food? How did we increase the amount of exercise we were doing? How did we stick to the regimen?”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Let’s say an enterprise wants to develop a three-year strategic plan to double market share, from 5% to 10%. Each person engaged in the planning imagines holding up a newspaper whose headline reads “Company X Has Doubled Its Market Share over the Past Three Years.” The team leader now asks them to identify the reasons they got there, what events occurred, what decisions were made, what went their way to get the enterprise to capture that market share. This enables the company to better identify strategies, tactics, and actions that need to be implemented to get to the goal. It also allows it to identify when the goal needs to be tweaked.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“It doesn’t so much matter where we end up as how we got there. What has happened in the recent past drives our emotional response much more than how we are doing overall. That’s how we can win $100 and be sad, and lose $100 and be happy.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Our problem is that we’re ticker watchers of our own lives. Happiness (however we individually define it) is not best measured by looking at the ticker, zooming in and magnifying moment-by-moment or day-by-day movements. We would be better off thinking about our happiness as a long-term stock holding. We would do well to view our happiness through a wide-angle lens, striving for a long, sustaining upward trend in our happiness stock, so it resembles the first Berkshire Hathaway chart.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

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

“Be a data sharer. That’s what experts do. In fact, that’s one of the reasons experts become experts. They understand that sharing data is the best way to move toward accuracy because it extracts insight from your listeners of the highest fidelity.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Maybe we could stop clinging to ego, giving up on that need to have a positive narrative of our lives. Maybe we could still drive a positive narrative but, instead of updating through credit and blame, we could get off on striving to be more objective and open-minded in assessing the influence of luck and skill on our outcomes. Maybe we could put in the time and hard work to retrain the way we process results, moving toward getting our positive self-image updates from accurate fielding, from truthseeking.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

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

“The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“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

“Whether it is a football game, a protest, or just about anything else, our pre-existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world. That those beliefs aren’t formed in a particularly orderly way leads to all sorts of mischief in our decision-making.”
― 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:”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“By treating decisions as bets, poker players explicitly recognize that they are deciding on alternative futures, each with benefits and risks. They also recognize there are no simple answers. Some things are unknown or unknowable.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts