Annie Duke Quotes Page 2


 
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Best 55 Quotes by Annie Duke – Page 2 of 2

Thinking in Bets Quotes

“Our lives are too short to collect enough data from our own experience to make it easy to dig down into decision quality from the small set of results we experience. If we buy a house, fix it up a little, and sell it three years later for 50% more than we paid, does that mean we are smart at buying and selling property, or at fixing up houses? It could, but it could also mean there was a big upward trend in the market and buying almost any piece of property would have made just as much money. Or maybe buying that same house and not fixing it up at all might have resulted in the same (or even better) profit.”

Thinking in Bets

“Our thinking can be divided into two streams, one that is fast, automatic, and largely unconscious, and another that is slow, deliberate, and judicious. The first system, the reflexive system, seems to do its thing rapidly and automatically, with or without our conscious awareness. The second system, the deliberative system... deliberates, it considers, it chews over the facts.”

Thinking in Bets

“Outcomes don’t tell us what’s our fault and what isn’t, what we should take credit for and what we shouldn’t. Unlike in chess, we can’t simply work backward from the quality of the outcome to determine the quality of our beliefs or decisions. This makes learning from outcomes a pretty haphazard process.”

Thinking in Bets

“Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from results in a more rational way, and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible.”

Thinking in Bets

“People are more willing to offer their opinion when the goal is to win a bet rather than get along with people in a room.”

Thinking in Bets

“Poker, in contrast to chess, is a game of incomplete information. It is a game of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty over time. (Not coincidentally, that is close to the definition of game theory.) Valuable information remains hidden. There is also an element of luck in any outcome. You could make the best possible decision at every point and still lose the hand, because you don’t know what new cards will be dealt and revealed. Once the game is finished and you try to learn from the results, separating the quality of your decisions from the influence of luck is difficult.”

Thinking in Bets

“Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good; being wrong feels about twice as bad as being right feels good.”

Thinking in Bets

“Self-serving bias has immediate and obvious consequences for our ability to learn from experience.”

Thinking in Bets

“The betting elements of decisions—choice, probability, risk, etc.—are more obvious in some situations than others. Investments are clearly bets. A decision about a stock (buy, don’t buy, sell, hold, not to mention esoteric investment options) involves a choice about the best use of financial resources. Incomplete information and factors outside of our control make all our investment choices uncertain. We evaluate what we can, figure out what we think will maximize our investment money, and execute. Deciding not to invest or not to sell a stock, likewise, is a bet.”

Thinking in Bets

“The more expert the player, the further into the future they plan.”

Thinking in Bets

“The more objective we are, the more accurate our beliefs become. And the person who wins bets over the long run is the one with the more accurate beliefs.”

Thinking in Bets

“The most successful investors in start-up companies have a majority of bad results. If you applied to NASA’s astronaut program or the NBC page program, both of which have drawn thousands of applicants for a handful of positions, things will go your way a minority of the time, but you didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. Don’t fall in love or even date anybody if you want only positive results. The world is structured to give us lots of opportunities to feel bad about being wrong if we want to measure ourselves by outcomes. Don’t fall for it!”

Thinking in Bets

“The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”

Thinking in Bets

“The value of poker in understanding decision-making has been recognized in academics for a long time.”

Thinking in Bets

“The world is a pretty random place. The influence of luck makes it impossible to predict exactly how things will turn out, and all the hidden information makes it even worse.”

Thinking in Bets

“There are a lot more choices other than the extremes of obesity or anorexia. For most of our decisions, there will be a lot of space between unequivocal right and wrong.”

Thinking in Bets

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“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”


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“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.”

Thinking in Bets

“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.”

Thinking in Bets

“Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions. Chess contains no hidden information and very little luck. The pieces are all there for both players to see. Pieces can’t randomly appear or disappear from the board or get moved from one position to another by chance. No one rolls dice after which, if the roll goes against you, your bishop is taken off the board. If you lose at a game of chess, it must be because there were better moves that you didn’t make or didn’t see. You can theoretically go back and figure out exactly where you made mistakes.”

Thinking in Bets

“What good poker players and good decision-makers have in common is their comfort with the world being an uncertain and unpredictable place. They understand that they can almost never know exactly how something will turn out. They embrace that uncertainty and, instead of focusing on being sure, they try to figure out how unsure they are, making their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur. The accuracy of those guesses will depend on how much information they have and how experienced they are at making such guesses. This is part of the basis of all bets.”

Thinking in Bets

“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.”

Thinking in Bets

“When we make in-the-moment decisions (and don’t ponder the past or future), we are more likely to be irrational and impulsive. This tendency we all have to favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self is called temporal discounting.”

Thinking in Bets

“When we take the long view, we’re going to think in a more rational way.”

Thinking in Bets

“Whenever we make a choice, we are betting on a potential future. We are betting that the future version of us that results from the decisions we make will be better off. At stake in a decision is that the return to us (measured in money, time, happiness, health, or whatever we value in that circumstance) will be greater than what we are giving up by betting against the other alternative future versions of us.”

Thinking in Bets

“You know that Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”? Turns out, if we were contemplating a thousand-mile walk, we’d be better off imagining ourselves looking back from the destination and figuring how we got there. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.”

Thinking in Bets

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“I've seen so many thousands of hands that I am just going to be right more often than most people.”


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