Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke was a good book from the retired poker player, author, corporate speaker and consultant. The subtitle is Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts and Duke notes that it’s about separating decision quality from outcome quality, if the outcome bad, it doesn’t mean it was a bad decision if made based on expected probabilities and the probabilities favored making it.

Covered in the book is how there's different facets to probabilistic decision-making, it's ok to be unsure of an outcome, to say something will happen 30% of the time and have it occur, or to say you're 30% confident something will occur and it does, doesn’t mean someone is wrong. Additionally, probabilistic decision-making looks at expected pay values (return times likelihood of success) in deciding on a course of action or choice, and very much tries to avoid thinking in absolutes.

Duke writes about beliefs that they're formed by (A) hearing something, (B) believing it, and then (C) maybe later deciding if it was true. The opposite of this approach is truth seeking, something that's difficult to do, often involves looking at dissenting viewpoints, and can be done with the help of others, in essence a support group around not buying into fallback ideas of simple good or bad luck, with insufficient weight put on the importance of decision making. In relation to discussions with others, Duke brings up the idea of saying things following an "and" rather than "but" statement and in relation to the self when making decisions, people should think about the future-tense version of themselves rather than simply the present-tense.

It was interesting reading provided by Duke and she highlights how there’s two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck, and the key is recognizing the difference between the two.