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121 " TED Talk, “The Pursuit of Ignorance.”) In the book and the talk, Firestein "
― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
122 " In addition to accountability and an interest in accuracy, the charter should also encourage and celebrate a diversity of perspectives to challenge biased thinking by individual members. "
123 " The challenge is not to change the way our brains operate but to figure out how to work within the limitations of the brains we already have. Being aware of our irrational behavior and wanting to change is not enough, in the same way that knowing that you are looking at a visual illusion is not enough to make the illusion go away. "
124 " Aldous Huxley recognized, “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. "
125 " ...thinking in bets is not a miracle cure. Thinking in bets won't make self-serving bias disappear or motivated reasoning vanish into thin air. But it will make those things better. And a little bit better is all we need to transform our lives. "
126 " So in loose multi-way action games, the math says play tight. In tight games, where the pots are tiny, the math says play loose. "
― Annie Duke , Decide to Play Great Poker: A Strategy Guide to No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em
127 " blaming others for their bad results and failing to give them credit for their good ones is under the influence of ego. "
128 " there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. "
129 " It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs. "
130 " As with all the strategies in this book, we must recognize that no strategy can turn us into perfectly rational actors. In addition, we can make the best possible decisions and still not get the result we want. "
131 " 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. "
132 " Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a premortem imagines a negative future. We can’t create a complete picture without representing both the positive space and the negative space. Backcasting reveals the positive space. Premortems reveal the negative space. Backcasting is the cheerleader; a premortem is the heckler in the audience. "
133 " Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. "
134 " 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. "
135 " It doesn’t take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief. "
136 " Whether it is a football game, a protest, or just about anything else, our pre-existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world. That those beliefs aren’t formed in a particularly orderly way leads to all sorts of mischief in our decision-making. "
137 " That’s chess, but life doesn’t look like that. It looks more like poker, where all that uncertainty gives us the room to deceive ourselves and misinterpret the data. Poker gives us the leeway to make mistakes that we never spot because we win the hand anyway and so don’t go looking for them, or the leeway to do everything right, still lose, and treat the losing result as proof that we made a mistake. Resulting, assuming that our decision-making is good or bad based on a small set of outcomes, is a pretty reasonable strategy for learning in chess. But not in poker—or life. "
138 " This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on. "
139 " What if we shifted our definition of “I don’t know” from the negative frame (“I have no idea” or “I know nothing about that,” which feels like we lack competence or confidence) to a more neutral frame? What if we thought about it as recognizing that, although we might know something about the chances of some event occurring, we are still not sure how things will turn out in any given instance? That is just the truth. If we accept that, “I’m not sure” might not feel so bad. What good poker players and good decision-makers have in common is their comfort with the world being an uncertain and unpredictable place. "
140 " Dan Kahan’s work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias—and may even be more susceptible. "