A review by femmecheng
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

4.0

4.5 stars rounded down. I generally really enjoyed this book. I suspect it's primarily because it speaks to things I've been learning about as part of my masters, but also because of recent discussion about the election.

Paraphrased - when people are asked about a good decision they've made vs. a bad decision, they almost always respond with a results-oriented answer, instead of thinking about the considerations they made when making the decision itself. You can make a good decision and have a bad outcome. You can make a bad decision and have a great outcome.

"What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of 'I'm not sure.' 'I'm not sure' does not mean that there is no objective truth...his point is that acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in executing on our goal to get closer to what is objectively true. To do this, we must stop treating 'I don't know' and 'I'm not sure' as strings of dirty words." I've had this exact conversation with my dental hygienist