Thinking in Bets Quotes

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

“Are you ready to really wrap your arms around uncertainty, like great decision-makers do? Are you ready to embrace this redefinition of wrong, and to recognize you are always guessing and that those guesses drive how you place your resources? Getting comfortable with this realignment, and all the good things that follow, starts with recognizing that you’ve been betting all along.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“The most successful investors in start-up companies have a majority of bad results. If you applied to NASA’s astronaut program or the NBC page program, both of which have drawn thousands of applicants for a handful of positions, things will go your way a minority of the time, but you didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. Don’t fall in love or even date anybody if you want only positive results. The world is structured to give us lots of opportunities to feel bad about being wrong if we want to measure ourselves by outcomes. Don’t fall for it!”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Poker teaches that lesson. A great poker player who has a good-size advantage over the other players at the table, making significantly better strategic decisions, will still be losing over 40% of the time at the end of eight hours of play. That’s a whole lot of wrong. And it’s not just confined to poker.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Redefining wrong allows us to let go of all the anguish that comes from getting a bad result. But it also means we must redefine “right.” If we aren’t wrong just because things didn’t work out, then we aren’t right just because things turned out well. Do we win emotionally to making that mindset trade-off? Being right feels really good. “I was right,” “I knew it,” “I told you so”—those are all things that we say, and they all feel very good to us. Should we be willing to give up the good feeling of “right” to get rid of the anguish of “wrong”? Yes. First, the world is a pretty random place. The influence of luck makes it impossible to predict exactly how things will turn out, and all the hidden information makes it even worse. If we don’t change our mindset, we’re going to have to deal with being wrong a lot. It’s built into the equation.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Look how quickly you can begin to redefine what it means to be wrong. Once we start thinking like this, it becomes easier to resist the temptation to make snap judgments after results or say things like “I knew it” or “I should have known.” Better decision-making and more self-compassion follow.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“At one such tournament, I told the audience that one player would win 76% of the time and the other would win 24% of the time. I dealt the remaining cards, the last of which turned the 24% hand into the winner. Amid the cheers and groans, someone in the audience called out, “Annie, you were wrong!” In the same spirit that he said it, I explained that I wasn’t. “I said that would happen 24% of the time. That’s not zero. You got to see part of the 24%!”
― 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.”
― 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.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“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