Thinking in Bets Overview

It’s simply not possible to know every single relevant variable when we make up our minds.

Human minds tend to confuse decisions with their outcomes, which makes it hard to see mistakes clearly.

Poker players call this tendency to confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome resulting, and it’s a dangerous tendency. A bad decision can lead to a good outcome, after all, and good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. No one who’s driven home drunk has woken up the next day and seen it as a good decision just because they d

In fact, decisions are rarely 100 percent right or wrong. Life isn’t like that. Life is like poker, a game of incomplete information – since you never know what cards the other players are holding – and luck. Our decision-making is like poker players’ bets. We bet on future outcomes based on what we believe is most likely to occur.

start to say, “I’m not sure.” This opens us up to thinking in terms of probability, which is far more useful.

There are very few sure things in life, so when we make decisions, we play the odds.

If we want to seek out truth, we have to work around our hardwired tendency to believe what we hear.