About the book
Annie Duke, a business consultant and former World Series of Poker champion, argues that decisions should be judged as bets made under uncertainty, since luck and hidden information mean good choices can still lead to bad results. One example is Seahawks coach Pete Carroll's much criticized call for a pass at the Patriots' one-yard line in Super Bowl XLIX, which was intercepted. Using cases from sports, poker, politics and business, Duke offers tools for asking how sure one is, weighing possible outcomes and telling skill apart from dumb luck. Moving from a need for certainty to an honest account of what one knows, she argues, weakens knee-jerk biases. The tools are useful for anyone making decisions without all the facts.
Peter Attia highly recommended it, and Marc Andreessen called it a compact guide to probabilistic fields like poker and venture capital, with the best explanation of resulting, the error of confusing process with outcome.
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This book has 6 recommendations
Seth Godin (Author & Entrepreneur)
Brilliant. Buy ten copies and give one to everyone you work with. It's that good.
Howard Marks (Co-chairman/Oaktree Capital Management)
The insights Duke offers in this book are incredibly helpful when we contemplate decisions in the face of multiple possible outcomes, and that renders her book enormously applicable to the world of investing.
Charles Duhigg (Author/The Power of Habit)
Through wonderful storytelling and sly wit, Annie Duke has crafted the ultimate guide to thinking about risk. We can all learn how to make better decisions by learning from someone who made choices for a living, with millions on the line.
Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder/Andreessen Horowitz)
Compact guide to probabilistic domains like poker, or venture capital. Best articulation of "resulting", drawing bad conclusions from confusing process and outcome. Recommend for people operating in the real world.
David Heinemeier Hansson (Co-Founder/Basecamp)
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke applies the thinking of poker decision making to the rest of life. That’s not as stupid of a premise as it sounds. I particularly like the idea of “resulting”, which is to judge the quality of a decision solely by its outcome. Lots of good decisions lead to bad outcomes because it's very rare that even good decisions have 100% chance of success. This draws on a lot of cognitive studies by Kahneman and others that show just how poor our default decision making powers are. But it’s also needlessly dragging. This is one of those books that would have been far better if it was a quarter the length, so to make it through, you have to be pretty good at skipping ahead when she belabors the point for the fifth time.
Peter Attia (Founder/Attia Medical)
I’m reading a great book, Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke (highly recommend if you have not read it).
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Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Charles Duhigg, Marc Andreessen, David Heinemeier Hansson, Peter Attia
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