Book Freak issue #100
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
Happy new year! It feels great to start 2023 with issue 100 of Book Freak. As you can see, Book Freak is on Substack now. The reason I moved to Substack is that Twitter, which owns Revue, decided to close the service. The good news is that the archives are now searchable. (Revue didn’t have search.) If you like Book Freak please consider subscribing to support the newsletter and everything we do at Cool Tools Lab. Thanks! — Mark Frauenfelder
Here are four brief excerpts from Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke:
Understand that there is no sure thing
“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. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.”
Accept that uncertainty is inevitable
“Incorporating uncertainty into the way we think about our beliefs comes with many benefits. By expressing our level of confidence in what we believe, we are shifting our approach to how we view the world. Acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in measuring and narrowing it. Incorporating uncertainty in the way we think about what we believe creates open-mindedness, moving us closer to a more objective stance toward information that disagrees with us.”
The comfort of saying, “I’m not sure”
“Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good; being wrong feels about twice as bad as being 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 live.”
Life is one long poker game and you can’t leave the table
“At the very beginning of my poker career, I heard an aphorism from some of the legends of the profession: “It’s all just one long poker game.” That aphorism is a reminder to take the long view, especially when something big happened in the last half hour, or the previous hand—or when we get a flat tire. Once we learn specific ways to recruit past and future versions of us to remind ourselves of this, we can keep the most recent upticks and downticks in their proper perspective. When we take the long view, we’re going to think in a more rational way.”
This last one reminds me of Ginsberg’s Law (which describes the three laws of thermodynamics as a poker game): (1) you can't win; (2) you can't break even; (3) you can't even get out of the game.
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