Decision strategist, ex-pro poker player
Annie Duke wrote Thinking in Bets and Quit, is a special partner at First Round Capital, and won over $4 million in tournaments as a professional poker player. Her refrain is to take what's implicit and make it explicit. If you don't make it explicit, she says, you never find out when it's wrong. At First Round that meant turning the partners' intuitions into a rubric.
Lenny's Podcast 00:44 00:50 01:07 1:00:20 1:03:27 1:03:49
Shipping
Name the signals that mean stop before you launch, and attach an action to each one while you still have no stake in the answer.
things go on way too long even like they're over budget and you've blown the timeline and when you finally shut it down you realize you should have done it a lot earlier
Decision Making
A good result is not evidence of a good decision. State the bet, put a number on your confidence, and record it before you know.
we don't actually know what the decision quality was, right, like all we know is that you had a good result
Annie Duke
locates the problem in the individual: resulting, motivated reasoning and hindsight bias drive decision errors, so you fix decisions by fixing personal process.
Donella Meadows and Peter Senge
argue behavior is produced by structure, feedback loops, incentives and delays, so blaming individual judgment misses the cause.
From Kill Criteria
Annie Duke
put a number on confidence. Hubbard pushes it further: anything that matters is observable and therefore measurable, and calibrated probability estimation makes even intangibles quantifiable.
Nassim Taleb
draws the opposite line. We systematically overestimate our ability to predict in complex domains, and a precise-looking model there is more dangerous than admitted ignorance because it manufactures false confidence.
From Thinking in Bets
Nominal Group Technique for Decisions
Gather opinions independently before discussion rather than discovering and deciding simultaneously. This prevents anchoring, groupthink, and HiPPO effects.
This will make you a better decision maker | Annie Duke (Thinking In Bets, former pro poker player)
Backcasting and Premortem
Backcasting and premortems are complementary techniques for exploring the future from two opposing perspectives. Backcasting imagines success and works backward to…
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
Truthseeking Group (Decision Pod) with CUDOS Norms
A truthseeking group is a small group of people committed to helping each other make better decisions through honest, accountable feedback. The group operates under…
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
Never judge a decision by its outcome alone; evaluate the quality of the decision process separately from the result.
Any post-decision review, retrospective, or performance evaluation where you are tempted to say a decision was good because it worked or bad because it failed.
Express confidence as a percentage (e.g., 'I am 72% sure') rather than binary certainty ('I'm sure' or 'I'm not sure').
When stating beliefs, making predictions, or evaluating options under uncertainty. Forces calibration and makes it easier to update beliefs when new information arrives.
If the outcome of a decision will not meaningfully affect your happiness in a week, a month, or a year, decide quickly and move on.
Low-stakes decisions where you find yourself agonizing. Apply the Happiness Test to distinguish high-impact from low-impact decisions and allocate decision effort…
If someone asks 'Wanna bet?' about one of your beliefs and you immediately feel less certain, that belief was probably held with unjustified confidence.
When evaluating the strength of your own beliefs or assumptions before making a decision. The 'wanna bet' test is a quick way to surface overconfidence.
If you find yourself citing the resources you have already spent as a reason to continue, you are likely in the grip of sunk cost fallacy and should seriously consider quitting.
Any ongoing project, investment, or commitment where the primary justification for continuing is what has already been spent rather than what future returns are expected.
If you would not start this project today given what you now know, that is a strong signal you should quit.
When evaluating whether to continue an ongoing commitment. This reframe strips away sunk costs and forces a fresh evaluation.
There are only two things that determine how your life turns out: the quality of your decisions and luck. You have control over only one of them.
This is the foundational premise of Duke's entire body of work. If outcomes are a function of decisions plus luck, and you cannot control luck, then the only lever for…
The quality of a decision should be evaluated by the quality of the process that produced it, not by the quality of the outcome.
Good decisions can produce bad outcomes due to luck, and bad decisions can produce good outcomes due to luck. If you judge decisions only by outcomes (resulting), you…
Beliefs are not binary (right or wrong); they are confidence levels on a spectrum that should be continuously updated as new information arrives.
Binary thinking about beliefs creates defensiveness when confronted with contradictory evidence. If instead you hold a belief at 72% confidence, new counter-evidence…
