Annie Duke Quotes

And this feeling that the result of the decision tells you something significant about the quality of the decision process is so powerful that even when the description of the decision is identical (you quit your job and take a new position), your view of that decision changes as the quality of the result changes.

If you want to pick a role model for designing a group's practical rules of engagement, you can't do better than Merton. To start, he coined the phrase "role model," along with "self-fulfilling prophecy," "reference group," "unintended consequences," and "focus group." He founded the science of sociology and was the first sociologist awarded the National Medal of Science.

To figure out whether a decision is good or bad, you need to know not just the things that might reasonably happen and what could be gained or lost, but also the likelihood of each possibility unfolding. That means, to become a better decision-maker, you need to be willing to estimate those probabilities.

Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them.

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.

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.

A common, simple way to develop kill criteria is with "states and dates:" "If by (date), I have/haven't (reached a particular state), I'll quit."

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of "I'm not sure."

Experience can be an effective teacher. But, clearly, only some students listen to their teachers.

A lot of experience can be an excellent teacher. A single experience, not so much. Looking across a large enough set of decisions and outcomes, we can start to tease out the lessons experience might offer us. Looking at just one outcome, we get resulting and hindsight bias.