Best Of Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
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| Painting above: A Game of Cards c. 1633 by Judith Leyster |
Declaring our uncertainty in our beliefs to others
makes us more credible communicators.
We assume that we don’t come off as 100% confident,
others will value our opinions less.
The opposite is usually true […]
Expressing our level of confidence
also invites people to be our collaborators.
p.71
We have the opportunity to learn from the way the future unfolds
to improve our beliefs and decisions going forward.
The more evidence we get from experience,
the less uncertainty we have about our beliefs and choices.
Actively using outcomes to examine our beliefs and bets
closes the feedback loop, reducing uncertainty.
This is the heavy lifting of how we learn.
p. 80
Taking credit for a win lifts our personal narrative.
So too does knocking down a peer by finding them at fault for a loss.
That’s schadenfreude: deriving pleasure from someone else’s misfortune.
Schadenfreude is basically the opposite of compassion.
p.102-103
A lot of the way we feel about ourselves comes from
how we think we compare with others.
This robust and pervasive habit of mind impedes learning.
Luckily, habits can be changed […]
by shifting what makes us feel good about ourselves,
we can move toward a more rational fielding of outcomes
and a more compassionate view of others.
p.105
On how we, "can respect that we are built for competition and that our self-narrative doesn't exist in a vacuum.”
Changing the routine is hard and takes work.
But we can leverage our natural tendency
to derive some of our self-esteem by how we compare to our peers […]
Keep the reward of feeling like we are doing well compared to our peers,
but change the features by which we compare ourselves:
be a better credit-giver than your peers,
more willing than others to admit mistakes,
more willing to explore possible reasons for an outcome with an open mind,
even, and especially, if that might cast you in a bad light
or shine a good light on someone else.
In this way we can feel that we are doing well by comparison
because we are doing something unusual and hard
that most people don’t do.
That makes us feel exceptional.
p.109
We know we tend to discount the success of our peers
and place responsibility firmly on their shoulders for their failures.
A good strategy for figuring out which way to bet
would be to imagine if that outcome had happened to us […]
we’ll be more likely to find things we could have done even better
and identify those factors that we had no control over.
p.113
Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good;
being wrong feels twice bad as feeling right feels good.
We are in a better place when we don’t have to live at the edges.
Euphoria or misery, with no choices in between,
is not a very self-compassionate way to life.
p.114
Be a data sharer. That’s what experts do.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons experts become experts.
They understand that sharing data
is the best way to move toward accuracy
because it extracts insights
from your listeners of the highest fidelity.
p. 158
If part of corporate success consists of providing the most accurate,
objective, and detailed evaluation of what’s going on,
employees will compete to win on those terms.
That will reward better habits of mind.
p.160
When we have a negative opinion about the person delivering the message,
we close our minds to what they are saying
and miss a lot of learning opportunities because of it.
Likewise, when we have a positive opinion of the messenger,
we tend to accept the message without much vetting.
Both are bad.
p.161
Skepticism gets a bum rap because
it tends to be associated with negative character traits […]
yet true skepticism is consistent with good manners,
civil discourse, and friendly communications.
p.169
Skepticism is about approaching the world
by asking why things might not be true
rather than why they are true.
p.169
If we embrace uncertainty and wrap that into the way
we communicate with the group,
confrontational dissent evaporates
because we start from a place of not being sure.
p.170
