Book Review—Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Thinking in Bets (Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts) has been a wildly popular book, and I can see why. I was really excited about the prospects—who isn’t interested in better decision making? And as an engineer, finding that balance between gathering enough info and taking action is a key career skill we can all improve. Did this book deliver? Partly.

Definitely I would say the book is too long, which is of course a common critique of books in general, but this one in particular has a lot of repetition. Also I got the wrong vibe from the book for a variety of reasons:

• There is a lot of focus on all the things that can go wrong with our thinking habits and biases, and a small amount of how to overcome these issues. Of course we have to understand what’s wrong to improve, but the balance here was way off.
• I got the impression a lot of the length came from (in addition to repetition) taking the opportunity to say “hey look at all these other pop psychology books I read. Also, I know what a gene phenotype is.” I know what a phenotype is, too, but you don’t see me bragging. Unless I just did.
• A lot of the real life examples used are from 2015-2016 and won’t have a lot of staying power. In 10 years, no one is going to have the slightest clue what Chris Christie said at the 2016 republican presidential debates, or maybe even who he was.

That said, there was a lot of good stuff in this book, and I want to focus on the positive.

Key Lessons

Ch1—I definitely thought this was a great new perspective: separating the quality of a decision from its outcome. We as a society do this only sometimes, as with the example of drunk driving (that is, it’s clearly a bad decision even if no one gets hurt), but certainly not when people ask "whats a good decision you made". In that scenario it’s never something that turned out poorly.

But it seems easy to remember this as a process for everyday life, especially as engineers who understand statistics and have a long-term goal of getting ahead. It's really important to remember this when making decisions that we know are good in the long run, but occasionally get the unlikely setback. For example, if I'm selling some memorabilia on eBay, but on one of the items the buyer doesn't pay on time, it doesn't mean it's a bad decision to unload my stuff on eBay, because most of the time it works well and overall we come out ahead.

Ch 2—I liked the idea of saying/implying “wanna bet" as being a trigger for actually evaluating what was just said. I've found I do this when I say something and my wife says "are you sure?", then I realize I've never actually vetted the idea/fact myself. The pattern of 1) hear 2) believe 3) maybe-someday-look-it-up is certainly true except for rare cases. We are all busy people!

Considering all decisions as bets is another useful way of thinking about it. It is perhaps a way to be more comfortable with uncertainty. I guess that's effectively the title of the book!

Ch3—There was a lot of repetition, so it can be breezed through after the first section on luck vs. skill. Identifying the difference between the two is tough, but important to do in order to facilitate real learning. One can't attribute all wins to skill and all losses to bad luck, or else nothing is learned.

Ch4—How to build productive groups of people interested in "truthseeking"—now we're getting somewhere! Developing a circle of people that reward accuracy is difficult to cultivate, but is likely to be very rewarding in the end.

Ch 5—Truthseeking in real life. This is some of the actionable stuff:

• Focus on what you agree with that other people say, including seeking out sources of information from opposing viewpoints. This is how we learn. 
• Evaluate the content of message rather than the source (note that this one is tough because that would be incredibly time consuming to do all the time, but still a valuable perspective).
• Make skepticism positive. With the right mindset it’s not about being wrong, but about checking on certainty of assertions and making sure we’ve considered all sides. Encourage this by requesting dissent from coworkers, etc., by asking explicitly if there is another way to see the issue or if anything is missing. That way it’s framed as positive.
• Outside of our own truthseeking groups, you can start by expressing uncertainly to open up that avenue and indicate to others that you are open to new information.
• Lead with assent—focus on parts of other people's arguments that you agree with, repeat them, then use AND instead of BUT when adding additional info that may dissent with the person you are conversing with, allowing them to be more open and less defensive. Focus on the future and ask how things might be improved—people like to set goals and generally aren’t defensive about things that haven’t even happened yet. 

Ch6 —The final chapter is possibly the best of the bunch because it has so many actionable "time travel" techniques to evaluate decisions. Some of these include:

• Keep a “Decision Swear Jar” to help catch yourself making non-useful statements like “always,” “never,” “I’m sure,” having a lack of self compassion, or characterizing things as “wrong”.
• Reconnaissance—mapping out potential futures based on a decision, trying to assign probabilities, and rating the outcomes. Can anticipate negative or positive outcomes and plan a strategy accordingly, rather than being reactive.
• Similarly, you can evaluate potential futures based on expected values of the results
• "Backcasting"—choosing a positive outcome and working backwards. It can help to imagine that the outcome has already happened. Combine with “premortems” to see potential positive and negative outcomes, which permits dissenting opinions in groups in a healthy way. 

Conclusion

I’d definitely recommend this book, with the added guidance that certain chapters (2 and 3) can be skimmed through pretty quickly to make the whole experience better (this explains the negative reviews from people who had to stop the book half way through). Overall a good read with some great perspectives synthesized from lots of well-regarded source material. It's not a career essential book for engineers, but rather a general purpose thought-provoker that anyone can learn from.

What was your favorite part of the book?

-Mike