Annie Duke

In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.

Annie Duke in Thinking in Bets

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run.

Annie Duke in Thinking in Bets

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.

Annie Duke in Thinking in Bets

Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable.

Annie Duke in Thinking in Bets

Aldous Huxley recognized, “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”

Annie Duke in Thinking in Bets

Those extra words don’t cost us much because it doesn’t come up very often—maybe never. But for people involved in specialized activities, it’s worth it to be able to communicate a complex concept in a single word that laypeople would need lengthy phrases to convey. Having a nuanced, precise vocabulary is what jargon is all about. It’s why carpenters have at least a dozen names for different kinds of nails, and in the field of neuro-oncology, there are more than 120 types of brain and central nervous system tumors.

Annie Duke in Thinking in Bets