Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

Our book for December is Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke.

For those who are interested, here is the link to the detailed results from the voting.

Here is a summary of the book:

Annie Duke explores how to improve decision-making in the face of uncertainty, drawing on her experience as a professional poker player. Duke emphasizes that life is more like poker than chess—outcomes are influenced by a combination of skill and luck, and complete information is rarely available. She encourages readers to view decisions as bets on possible futures, which helps cultivate objectivity and open-mindedness, and to separate the quality of decisions from the randomness of outcomes. This approach avoids the trap of "resulting," where one judges the quality of a decision solely by its result rather than its process.​

Duke also addresses several psychological biases that cloud human judgment, such as hindsight bias, motivated reasoning, and binary thinking. She suggests practical strategies for better decision-making, such as seeking diverse perspectives, embracing uncertainty, and focusing on truth-seeking rather than being "right." The book provides tools like the 10-10-10 method and the use of group decision “pods” to foster thoughtful, collaborative, and probabilistic thinking. Ultimately, "Thinking in Bets" is a guide to navigating the complexity and unpredictability of real-life choices by increasing our comfort with uncertainty and learning from every decision, regardless of the outcome.​

This event will be hybrid. I will host the meeting in person at my house in Berkeley which is near the intersection of College Ave and Woolsey St. I will email people the address the Saturday before the meeting.

Here are the Google Meet details:
Link: https://meet.google.com/wyh-peww-fpm
Or dial: ‪(US) +1 316-302-5691‬ PIN: ‪799 171 663‬#