Annie Duke Quotes

People didn't even agree on what the terms always and never meant! If you're like most people, you were pretty surprised by these results. Most of us aren't aware of the wide range of what these words mean to different people. We assume that when we use a term, other people use it in the same way we do and mean the same thing we do.

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future.

Precision uncovers disagreement. It uncovers places where your belief is different from someone else's belief. And that's good, because you want to find out when you have something wrong. It gives you the chance to get it right. Think about it like this: Saying "2 + 2 is a small number" will help you get better at math, but it won't help you become an expert. "A small number" is technically correct, but it is much more helpful for your teacher to find out if you think the answer is 5, or 2, or 4, which are all small numbers. It's true that the less precise answer makes it harder to be wrong, but you want to find out when you have the wrong answer if you are going to get better at math.

And the effect is stronger the more the ticket costs. Imagine if, instead of $95, you had spent $150 or $250 or $500. As the price tag grows, so does the effect of sunk costs.

In fact, losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning feels good to us.

Be picky about what you stick to. Persevere in the things that matter, that bring you happiness, and that move you toward your goals. Quit everything else, to free up those resources so you can pursue your goals and stop sticking to things that slow you down.

Truthseeking, the desire to know the truth regardless of whether the truth aligns with the beliefs we currently hold, is not naturally supported by the way we process information. We might think of ourselves as open-minded and capable of updating our beliefs based on new information, but the research conclusively shows otherwise. Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs.

The promise of this book is that if we follow the example of poker players by making explicit that our decisions are bets, we can make better decisions and anticipate (and take protective measures) when irrationality is likely to keep us from acting in our best interest.

The English language itself favors grit, describing those who persevere with positive terms like can-do, unwavering, steadfast, resolute, daring, audacious, undaunting, gutsy, and hardy. Or as having backbone, pluck, mettle, tenacity, or stick-to-itiveness.

If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth.

There are many reasons why wrapping our arms around uncertainty and giving it a big hug will help us become better decision-makers. Here are two of them. First, "I'm not sure" is simply a more accurate representation of the world. Second, and related, when we accept that we can't be sure, we are less likely to fall into the trap of black-and-white thinking.

Of course, the world is uncertain and the world does change. That means that our goals ought to change in response. But the goals we set are remarkably unresponsive to new information.

A necessary part of becoming a better decision-maker is learning from experience. Experience contains the lessons for improving future decisions. Resulting causes you to learn the wrong lessons.

our brains evolved to create certainty and order. We are uncomfortable with the idea that luck plays a significant role in our lives. We recognize the existence of luck, but we resist the idea that, despite our best efforts, things might not work out the way we want. It feels better for us to imagine the world as an orderly place, where randomness does not wreak havoc and things are perfectly predictable.

Maybe we could stop clinging to ego, giving up on that need to have a positive narrative of our lives. Maybe we could still drive a positive narrative but, instead of updating through credit and blame, we could get off on striving to be more objective and open-minded in assessing the influence of luck and skill on our outcomes. Maybe we could put in the time and hard work to retrain the way we process results, moving toward getting our positive self-image updates from accurate fielding, from truthseeking.