Annie Duke

every decision has risks

The promise of this book is that if we follow the example of poker players by making explicit that our decisions are bets, we can make better decisions and anticipate (and take protective measures) when irrationality is likely to keep us from acting in our best interest.

We don’t think of our parenting choices as bets but they are. We want our children to be happy, productive adults when we send them out into the world. Whenever we make a parenting choice (about discipline, nutrition, school, parenting philosophy, where to live, etc.), we are betting that our choice will achieve the future we want for our children more than any other choice we might make given the constraints of the limited resources we have to allocate—our time, our money, our attention.

Poker players live in a world where that risk is made explicit. They can get comfortable with uncertainty because they put it up front in their decisions

People are credulous creatures who find it
very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt

For survival-essential skills, type I errors (false positives) were less costly than type II errors (false negatives).

Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs.

The surprise is that blind-spot bias is greater the smarter you are.

Remember the order in which we form abstract beliefs:

We hear something;
We believe it;
Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether or not it is true.

The more we recognize that we are betting on our beliefs (with our happiness, attention, health, money, time, or some other limited resource), the more we are likely to temper our statements, getting closer to the truth as we acknowledge the risk inherent in what we believe.