Title Thinking in Bets
Author Annie Duke
Year Published 2019
Kind of Book Rationality/Decision Making
How strongly I recommend it 7/10
My Impressions Powerful ideas, but it could have been shorter. If you have read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" this will be mostly review, however, there were a few big ideas. 1) Ask yourself how much you would be willing to bet on whether what you think is true. 2) judge yourself based on whether or not the decisions you made were smart, not on whether the results of those decisions were favorable or unfavorable.
Date Read Nov 2020
Practical Takeaways
Resist the temptation to change your strategy just because a few hands didn't turn out well in the short run
Separate bad results from bad decisions
Make peace with not knowing
Get comfortable with saying "I'm not sure"
Treat your beliefs as works in progress
(word swap) Don't say "I knew it"
(word swap) Don't say "I should have known"
Don't think of predictions as being "right" or "wrong" (40% wins 40% of the time)
Think probabilistically
Put your money where your mouth is
Become comfortable with uncertainty
Make the risk of your decisions explicit in each decision you make
Don't make a habit of playing suited connectors
Questions to ask for evaluating the truth of what you "know"
How do I know this?
Where did I get this information?
Who did I get it from?
What is the quality of my sources?
How much do I trust them?
How up to date is my information?
Ask yourself how much you'd be willing to bet you are right. (it will make you more likely to examine the information)
When someone makes a bold claim say "Wanna bet?"
Take a good hard look at your beliefs
Recognize that what you believe now is subject to change
Think about how confident you are in your beliefs
Rate your level of confidence in a belief on 0-100% scale
Don't worry about people thinking you are less believable because you're not 100% certain (they will probably trust you more because they see that you've thought a lot about it if you say you're %87 sure)
Make small adjustments in your degrees of certainty or uncertainty in your beliefs after you get new evidence (eg. I was 58% sure, but not I'm 46% sure instead of "I was right but now I'm wrong")
Tell people what percentage you are sure you're right ( people will be more likely to offer critiques of your view. They won't think you will get defensive if they contradict you)
Don't attribute only luck to your loses and only skill to your wins
Don't attribute only skill to your loses and luck to your wins (especially for depressed people)
Form a decision pod group to analyze each other's decisions with. (others are better at spotting your blind spots than you)
Make sure there are at least 3 of you in the decision pod
When asking someone to help you evaluate a decision you made. Only give them as much information as you have when you make the decision. Don't tell them what the outcome of the decision you made was.
First, evaluate the decisions you made when the outcome was desirable. Ask what could I have done better (it is easier to start with things where the outcome was good because it is less painful)
Engage in content from people whose opinions differ from your own
Always listen to both sides of the story
When asking others to help you evaluate a decision you made, give them as much detail as possible at what you knew and didn't know
Don't shoot the messenger
Watch the news of the party you don't belong to too
When you hear an account from someone you like, imagine someone you don't like saying it
When you hear an account from someone you don't like, imagine someone you like saying it
Ask yourself "How would I feel if I heard this from a different source?"
Begin by making it clear to the audience that you are unceratin. That is isn't a matter of right and wrong, but of probability
(word swap) When correcting what someone says, listen for things you agree with, state those specifically, and then follow with "and" instead of "but" (people feel defensive when they hear "but". And allows you to reach them without them tensing up)
Ask the person if they are just looking to vent or if they are looking for advice
Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish t till it comes to have a separate and integral interest.-Henry David Thoreau
(10-10-10) Ask yourself "what are the consequences of this action in
10 minutes?
10 months ?
10 years?
-Suzy Welch
Ask yourself "how would I feel now if I made this decision
10 minutes ago?
10 months ago?
10 years ago?
When experiencing something shitty, imagine how great of a cocktail story it will make someday
Use ride-sharing services when you go to a bar
Set up an automatic allocation of funds into a retirement account
Big Ideas
Life is poker, not chess (the best player always wins in chess, the best player does not always win in poker)
How we think we form beliefs
We hear something
We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false
We form our belief
How we actually form beliefs
We hear something
We believe it to be true
Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false
Surprising Facts
A key gene for baldness is on the X chromosome, which you get from your mother but men with bald fathers have an increased chance of going bald. Baldness anywhere in your family increases your chances of going bald
Fake news isn't meant to change minds. It is meant to confirm beliefs people already have
The smarter a person is the stronger their blind-spot bias. The better they are at constructing a narrative that supports their beliefs
It is pretty common for a species to become "unextinct" ie. Someone find a population of the animal thought to be extinct
After giving rats treats every time they push a lever and then stopping. They give up quickly. If you give rats treats on a varied reward pattern then stop, they don't give up until after trying a very long time (sometimes a couple thousand times.)
Because humans are so good at detecting deception, humans may have evolved the ability to deceive themselves via self-serving bias to make their attractive self confidence look legitimate to mates
Depressed people sometimes show the opposite of a self-serving bias where they think that everything bad that happens to them is their fault and everything good that happens is luck
Unknown Terms
Resulting: the tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome 2) a term that comes from poker
The Rashamon Effect: When different people's accounts of the same event differ dramatically
Temporal Discounting: The tendency people have to favor their present-self at the expense of their future-self
Winner's Tilt: When a series of good outcomes distorts decision-making, particularly in causing a player to play as if their win rate is not a momentary fluctuation from the mean but will continue at the rate in the future.