Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke
Summary
- Annie Duke was a prize winning poker player, but also a psychologist. She writes about how to use a poker player mentality when making life decisions
How I discovered it
- Recommended by Art of Manliness
How the book changed me
- One important principle i learned is not to judge the quality of decisions by the outcome.
- A second principle is to stop feeling sorry for myself, blaming 'luck' and examining how to improve your odds next time around.
Details
- Dont judge decisions by the results
- Real life is not like chess where all the information is visible and nothing is hidden
- Getting comfortable with not being sure helps us make better decisions
- We have a tendency to alter interpretation of information to confirm our existing beliefs
- The internet speeds up our retreat into a confirmatory bubble
- Smart people have a greater confirmation bias even when presented with evidence contrary to their beliefs
- When guessing, consider a range of plausible alternatives to increase accuracy
- Use belief calibration instead of right or wrong
- Income, health, good marriage and lack of trauma only account for 8 - 15 percent of variance in happiness
- Deliberately seek out different opinions to avoid falling in love with our own ideas
- Sharing data and knowledge helps us become experts
- In the moment emotions can lead us to make illogical decisions
- Ulysses contract - make plans to prevent your future self making stupid decisions
- Use scenario planning to plan for future possibilities
- Use a premortem to imagine negative outcomes and plan accordingly
Quotes
- Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out - the quality of our decisions and luck - Annie Duke
- Experience is not what happens to a man - it is what a man does with what happens to him - Aldous Huxley