Annie Duke, a former professional poker player and decision-making expert, shares her insights on how to make better choices. She discusses the importance of overcoming biases like hindsight bias and introduces 'knowledge tracking' to improve decision quality. With practical tools, she explains when to make quick decisions and when to take your time. Duke also emphasizes the need for decision-making education in schools and presents the 'only option test' to navigate hard choices. Get ready to enhance your decision-making skills!
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insights INSIGHT
Resulting
Resulting is judging decision quality solely on outcomes.
This hinders learning as good outcomes can come from bad decisions due to luck.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Pete Carroll's Super Bowl Play
Pete Carroll's Super Bowl pass play, intercepted by Malcolm Butler, was deemed the "worst play" due to the negative outcome.
Had the pass been complete, the same decision would be lauded, illustrating resulting.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Knowledge Tracking
Combat resulting and hindsight bias with knowledge tracking.
Ask yourself: What did you know then versus now, and was the later knowledge knowable or affordable beforehand?
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Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
Annie Duke
In this book, Annie Duke teaches readers how to make better decisions by treating them as 'bets' on uncertain outcomes. She emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between the quality of a decision and its outcome, acknowledging the role of luck, and avoiding biases such as 'resulting' and hindsight bias. Duke draws on her experiences as a professional poker player and combines these with insights from cognitive psychology and other fields to provide tools for making more objective and thoughtful decisions. The book encourages readers to get comfortable with uncertainty, seek truth through diverse opinions, and learn from outcomes to improve future decision-making[1][3][5].
We all make many decisions every single day. From little ones like what to eat for breakfast, to big ones like whether to take a new job. Given how regularly we're deciding, we certainly have a vested interest in getting better at this skill. But how do we do so? How can we get better at making big choices, and spend less time dithering over the insignificant minutiae that often overwhelms our mental bandwidth? And why didn't anyone teach us how to do this stuff to begin with?
My guest today has written a book that offers an education in a subject matter many of us missed out on. Her name is Annie Duke, she's a former professional poker player and decision-making expert and strategist, and her latest book is How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. Today on the show, Annie shares many of those practical tools, beginning with how to overcome hindsight bias and "resulting" -- our tendency to judge decisions based on their outcomes -- by doing something called "knowledge tracking." We discuss how to figure out the probabilities for things that seem difficult to predict and the importance of embracing an "archer's mindset." When then get into when you should make decisions slowly, when you can speed up, how to employ the "only option" test when making a choice, and why when a decision is hard, it’s actually easy.
The Art of Manliness 
