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

Universalism: don’t shoot the message

The Mertonian norm of communism (obviously, not the political system) refers to the communal ownership of data within groups. Merton argued that, in academics, an individual researcher’s data must eventually be shared with the scientific community at large for knowledge to advance. “Secrecy is the antithesis of this norm; full and open communicatio

Much of our biased information processing stems from the amount of rope that uncertainty affords us. Well-deployed diversity of viewpoints in a group can reduce uncertainty due to incomplete information by filling in the gaps in what we know, making life start to fit more neatly on a chessboard.

Carroll got unlucky. He had control over the quality of the play-call decision, but not over how it turned out. It was exactly because he didn’t get a favorable result that he took the heat. He called a play that had a high percentage of ending in a game-winning touchdown or an incomplete pass (which would have allowed two more plays for the Seahaw

The well-known advice “don’t shoot the messenger” is actually good shorthand for the reasons why we want to protect and encourage dissenting ideas. Plutarch’s Life of Lucullus provided an early, literal example: the king of Armenia got advance notice that Lucullus’s troops were approaching. He killed the messenger for delivering that message and, h

As a rule of thumb, if we have an urge to leave out a detail because it makes us uncomfortable or requires even more clarification to explain away, those are exactly the details we must share.

In the movie, the matrix was built to be a more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable: our beliefs are nearly always correct; favorable outcomes are the result of our skill; there are plausible reasons why unfavorable outcomes are beyond our control; and we compare fav

The systematic errors in the way we field the outcomes of our peers comes at a real cost. It doesn’t just come at the cost of reaching our goals but also at the cost of compassion for others.

When we work backward from results to figure out why those things happened, we are susceptible to a variety of cognitive traps, like assuming causation when there is only a correlation, or cherry-picking data to confirm the narrative we prefer. We will pound a lot of square pegs into round holes to maintain the illusion of a tight relationship betw

CHAPTER 2 Wanna Bet?