Thinking in Bets Quotes

“Skepticism is about approaching the world by asking why things might not be true rather than why they are true. It’s a recognition that, while there is an objective truth, everything we believe about the world is not true. Thinking in bets embodies skepticism by encouraging us to examine what we do and don't know and what our level of confidence in our beliefs and predictions. This moves us closer to what is objectively true.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Our capacity for self-deception has few boundaries. Look at the reasons people give for their accidents on actual auto insurance forms: “I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way.” “A pedestrian hit me and went under my car.” “The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.” “An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car, and vanished.” “The pedestrian had no idea which direction to run, so I ran over him.” “The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way when it struck my car.”*”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“blaming others for their bad results and failing to give them credit for their good ones is under the influence of ego.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“「向後預測」與「事前驗屍」相輔相成：前者想像正面的未來，後者幻想負面的未來。我們若不同時表示正面和負面的空間，就無法塑造出完整圖像。「向後預測」會展示正面空間，「事前驗屍」則揭露負面空間。「向後預測」是啦啦隊員（搖旗吶喊者），「事前驗屍」是喝倒采的觀眾。”
― 安妮．杜克 (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？

“在現實生活決策時納入過去或未來的自己，並不會導致時空連續體崩潰，也不會液化消失。讓過去或未來的我們拜訪自己，可讓現在的我們更好地下注。決策時隔離其他時空的自己，不思索類似決策在過去和未來可能導致哪些結果，往往會犯下錯誤，並礙於時間範圍遭扭曲而陷入思考困境。決策者會希望與過去和未來的自己碰撞，而心智時光旅行就能辦到這點。”
― 安妮．杜克 (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？

“如果你把眾多個體正確地擺放在一起，讓一些個體可以運用推理能力，駁斥別人的主張，而且所有個體都感受到某種共同的牽繫或共同的命運，從而產生文明互動，這樣就能創造出一個團體，可進行優異的推理，轉化為社會體制中突然出現的資產。由此可見，任何團體或機構的目標若是要追尋真相，那麼它就必須具備多樣化的智識和意識型態。”
― 安妮．杜克 (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？

“我們的習慣會在由三個部分組成的神經迴路中運作：提示（cue）、常規（routine）和獎勵（reward）。以吃餅乾為例：提示是「飢餓感」，常規是「翻箱倒櫃找餅乾」，獎勵是「血糖升高」。那麼在打撲克時，提示可能是「贏得一手牌」，常規是「攬功」，獎勵就是「提升自我」。查爾斯．杜希格（Charles Duhigg）在《為什麼我們這樣生活，那樣工作？》（The Power of Habit，大塊文化出版）提出改變習慣的黃金法則：處理習慣的最佳方式是尊重習慣迴路，「要改變習慣，必須維持舊的提示並提供舊的獎勵，但插入新的常規。」”
― 安妮．杜克 (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？

“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. 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

“You know that Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”? Turns out, if we were contemplating a thousand-mile walk, we’d be better off imagining ourselves looking back from the destination and figuring how we got there. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“When we view these upticks and downticks under the magnification of that in-the-moment zoom lens, our emotional responses are, similarly, amplified. Like the flat tire in the rain, we are capable of treating things that will have little effect on our long-term happiness as having significant impact.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“When we make in-the-moment decisions (and don’t ponder the past or future), we are more likely to be irrational and impulsive.* This tendency we all have to favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self is called temporal discounting.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“As with all the strategies in this book, we must recognize that no strategy can turn us into perfectly rational actors. In addition, we can make the best possible decisions and still not get the result we want.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“People are more willing to offer their opinion when the goal is to win a bet rather than get along with people in a room.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Diversity is the foundation of productive group decision-making, but we can’t underestimate how hard it is to maintain. We all tend to gravitate toward people who are near clones of us. After all, it feels good to hear our ideas echoed back to us.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“In addition to accountability and an interest in accuracy, the charter should also encourage and celebrate a diversity of perspectives to challenge biased thinking by individual members.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Complex and open-minded thought is most likely to be activated when decision makers learn prior to forming any opinions that they will be accountable to an audience (a) whose views are unknown, (b) who is interested in accuracy, (c) who is reasonably well-informed, and (d) who has a legitimate reason for inquiring into the reasons behind participants’ judgments/choices.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“But, while a group can function to be better than the sum of the individuals, it doesn’t automatically turn out that way. Being in a group can improve our decision quality by exploring alternatives and recognizing where our thinking might be biased, but a group can also exacerbate our tendency to confirm what we already believe”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“In the movie, the matrix was built to be a more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable: our beliefs are nearly always correct; favorable outcomes are the result of our skill; there are plausible reasons why unfavorable outcomes are beyond our control; and we compare favorably with our peers. We deny or at least dilute the most painful parts of the message.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“In that narrative, taking credit for something good is the same as saying we made the right decision. And being right feels good. Likewise, thinking that something bad was our fault means we made a wrong decision, and being wrong feels bad. When our self-image is at stake, we treat our fielding decisions as 100% or 0%: right versus wrong, skill versus luck, our responsibility versus outside our control. There are no shades of grey.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

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

“It doesn’t take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“We do not simply ‘react to’ a happening. . . . We behave according to what we bring to the occasion.” Our beliefs affect how we process all new things, “whether the ‘thing’ is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“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. Being aware of our irrational behavior and wanting to change is not enough, in the same way that knowing that you are looking at a visual illusion is not enough to make the illusion go away.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“The verdict appears to be a consequence of hindsight bias—the human tendency to believe that whatever happened was bound to happen, and that everyone must have known it. If [the foreman] believed that an explosion was imminent, then he is a monster; but of that there is no evidence. Hindsight bias is not enough to support a verdict.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“The same belief-formation process led hundreds of millions of people to bet the quality and length of their lives on their belief about the merits of a low-fat diet. Led by advice drawn, in part, from research secretly funded by the sugar industry, Americans in one generation cut a quarter of caloric intake from fat, replacing it with carbohydrates.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“When we work backward from results to 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

“The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“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