Thinking in Bets Quotes

“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

“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

“...thinking in bets is not a miracle cure. Thinking in bets won't make self-serving bias disappear or motivated reasoning vanish into thin air. But it will make those things better. And a little bit better is all we need to transform our lives.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

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