Quotes from Annie Duke

Do you want to just let it all out, or are you thinking of what to do about it next?

information. We

We treat outcomes as good signals for decision quality, as if we were playing chess. If the outcome is known, it will bias the assessment of the decision quality to align with the outcome quality.

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.

This tendency we all have to favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self is called temporal discounting.* We are willing to take an irrationally large discount to get a reward now instead of waiting for a bigger reward later.

And pros are just better at that choice, playing a mere 15% to 25% of the two-card starting combinations they are dealt in Texas Hold'em. Compare that to an amateur, who will stick with their starting cards over half the time.

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.

Quitting freed Chappelle, as it did Butterfield, to explore other opportunities that would bring him greater happiness and creative satisfaction.

If our only options are being 100% right or 100% wrong, with nothing in between, then information that potentially contradicts a belief requires a total downgrade, from right all the way to wrong. There is no "somewhat less sure" option in an all-or-nothing world, so we ignore or discredit the information to hold steadfast in our belief.

When we work backward from results to figure out why those things happened, we are susceptible to a variety of cognitive traps, like assuming causation when there is only a correlation, or cherry-picking data to confirm the narrative we prefer. We will pound a lot of square pegs into round holes to maintain the illusion of a tight relationship between our outcomes and our decisions.

Essentially, regardless of the history they have with the decision, they ask themselves, "If I were approaching this decision fresh, would I want to enter into this course of action?

I know viscerally how likely 60–40 and 70–30 favorites are to lose (and, of course, the opposite). When people complained that Nate Silver did his job poorly because he had Clinton favored, I thought, "Those people haven't gotten all their chips in a pot with a pair against a straight draw and lost.

To pursue radical ideas, he has to be a radical loss-cutter. Every dollar they save by getting to no quickly is a dollar they can spend on something that could change the world.

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.

In the movie, the matrix was built to be a more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable: our beliefs are nearly always correct; favorable outcomes are the result of our skill; there are plausible reasons why unfavorable outcomes are beyond our control; and we compare favorably with our peers. We deny or at least dilute the most painful parts of the message.

If we find the Achilles' heel," Teller told me, "thank God we found the Achilles' heel after $2 million instead of after $20 million.

But, while a group can function to be better than the sum of the individuals, it doesn't automatically turn out that way. Being in a group can improve our decision quality by exploring alternatives and recognizing where our thinking might be biased, but a group can also exacerbate our tendency to confirm what we already believe

One of Teller's valuable insights is that pedestal-building creates the illusion of progress rather than actual progress itself.

The endowment and sunk cost effects live together in a way that amplifies escalation of commitment. Status quo bias adds to the mix of cognitive forces gaffing the scale.

At one such tournament, I told the audience that one player would win 76% of the time and the other would win 24% of the time. I dealt the remaining cards, the last of which turned the 24% hand into the winner. Amid the cheers and groans, someone in the audience called out, "Annie, you were wrong!" In the same spirit that he said it, I explained that I wasn't. "I said that would happen 24% of the time. That's not zero. You got to see part of the 24%!

Look how quickly you can begin to redefine what it means to be wrong. Once we start thinking like this, it becomes easier to resist the temptation to make snap judgments after results or say things like "I knew it" or "I should have known." Better decision-making and more self-compassion follow.

CUDOS stands for Communism (data belong to the group), Universalism (apply uniform standards to claims and evidence, regardless of where they came from), Disinterestedness (vigilance against potential conflicts that can influence the group's evaluation), and Organized Skepticism (discussion among the group to encourage engagement and dissent).

Memory creep is the reconstruction of your memory of what you knew that hindsight bias creates. MEMORY CREEP When what you know after the fact creeps into your memory of what you knew before the fact.

Monkeys and pedestals boils down to some very good advice: Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.