Top Quotes: “How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices” — Annie Duke

“For reasons that are going to become clear, a good decision tool seeks to reduce the role of cognitive bias (such as overconfidence, hindsight bias, or confirmation bias) and a pros and cons list tends to amplify the role of bias.”

“Petermining whether a decision is good or bad means examining the quality of the beliefs informing the decision, the available options, and how the future might turn out given any choice you make.”

“Here’s the problem: Look at the dates of the pieces.

All of these stories are from after the election.

I went ten pages deep on Google and couldn’t find any critique specifically about Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from before the election. Although there is an abundance of opinion pieces critiquing other aspects of Clinton’s campaign strategy, none of them anticipated this particular problem.”

“Polling errors reveal themselves only after the fact, not before.

Making matters worse, there wasn’t a national polling error. The national polls tracked the margin by which Clinton won the popular vote pretty accurately. Nor was it a systematic state polling error.

How could the Clinton campaign know, before the vote, that there is a problem in exactly those three states (but not others)? It doesn’t seem like she could, at least not based on publicly available information.”

“When you are making a decision, you see the future possibilities like the branches of a tree, each branch representing some way things could unfold.

The thicker the bough, the more likely the outcome. The tinier the twig, the less likely the outcome. Some boughs branch off in multiple ways. These branches-off branches represent things that might occur further in the future, depending on what happens along the way.

That’s what the future looks like when it’s ahead of you: a tree of possibilities.”

“SIX STEPS TO BETTER DECISION -MAKING

Step 1-Identify the reasonable set of possible outcomes.

Step 2-Identify your preference using the payoff for each outcome — to what degree do you like or dislike each outcome, given your values?

Step 3-Estimate the likelihood of each outcome unfolding.

Step 4 Assess the relative likelihood of outcomes you like and dislike for the option under consideration.

Step 5-Repeat Steps 1–4 for other options under consideration.

Step 6 Compare the options to one another.”

“To get a fuller grasp of the set of possible outcomes for any decision, you also need to identify your preference for each outcome.

So let’s start with explicitly adding information to the trees we have started developing by expressing the desirability of each of the reasonable ways a decision could turn out. The simplest way to do this is to list the potential outcomes on the tree in order of your most preferred to your least preferred.”

“The bad news is that a pros and cons list doesn’t get you thinking about magnitude, how big a positive any to is or how big a negative any con is, which is also necessary to Step 2.”

“If you dismiss making estimates of probability by saying, “I’d only be guessing,” then you’re letting yourself off the hook of trying to figure out what you know or what you could find out. Once you say “I’d only be guessing,” there’s no more work to be done. By giving up, you won’t even bother to apply the knowledge you do have to the decision.”

“Whether you’re estimating the weight of a bison or the likelihood that Kingdom Comb will succeed, your job as a decision-maker is to figure out two things:

(1) What do I already know that will make my guess more educated?

(2) What can I find out that will make my guess more educated?”

“Both resulting and hindsight bias can lead you to beat yourself up (or beat other people up) after a bad outcome, such as when the choice to move to Boston doesn’t work out. By putting the tree back together, including getting your preferences in order and making an estimate of the chances of each outcome occurring, you can see more clearly that the most likely outcomes ranged from extremely good (loving the job, city, and weather) to pretty good. The two really bad outcomes were unlikely to happen.”

“Terms that express likelihoods mean very different things to different people.

• Using ambiguous terms can lead to confusion and miscommunication with people you want to engage for help.
• Being more precise, by expressing probabilities as percentages, makes it more likely you’ll uncover information that can correct inaccuracies in your beliefs and broaden your knowledge.”

“One way to get to the outside view is to make it a habit, as part of your decision process, to ask yourself what is true of the world in general, independent of anyone’s point of view.

A helpful way to get an idea of what’s true of the world in general is to find out if there is information available about the likelihood of different outcomes in situations similar to yours.

That information is called a base rate.

There are plenty of places to get surveys, studies, and statistics on aspects of relationships, health, investing, business, education, employment, and consumerism that would likely be relevant to any type of decision you might be making.”

“A useful tool you can use to break the gridlock is the Only-Option Test.

If this were the only thing I could order on the menu …

If this were the only show I could watch on Netflix tonight ..

If this were the only place I could go for vacation ..

If this were the only college I got accepted to …

If this were the only house I could buy ..

If this were the only job I got offered …

The Only-Option Test clears away the debris cluttering your decision. If you’d be happy if Paris were your only option, and you’d be happy if Rome were your only option, that reveals that if you just flip a coin, you’ll be happy whichever way the coin lands.”

“Identifying low-impact decisions, especially ones that repeat, is so important. Those types of low-risk decisions give you the opportunity to experiment. Experimentation gets the world to tell you what works and what doesn’t work and helps you figure out your preferences, your likes and dislikes.

And all that experimentation will make you better informed, paying off in more accurate sorting.”

“Finding ways to make low-impact, easy-to-quit decisions in advance of a high-impact, harder-to-quit decision.”

“Once you settle on a choice that’s good enough — regardless of how long you’ve taken, whether you’ve flipped a coin or conducted a lengthy decision process, or whether your options are indistinguishable or you have a clear favorite — part of a good decision process includes asking yourself a final question:

“Is there information that I could find out that would change my mind?””

“Imagining yourself at some time in the future, having succeeded or failed at a goal, and looking back at how you arrived at that destination.”

“1. Modifying your decision to increase the chances of the good stuff happening and decrease the chances of the bad stuff happening.

2. Planning how you’ll react to future outcomes, so they don’t take you by surprise.

3. Looking for ways to mitigate the impact of bad outcomes if they occur.”

“1) Imagine a positive goal.

(2) Imagine that Dr. Evil has control of your brain, causing you to make decisions that will guarantee fallure.

(3) Any given instance of that type of decision must have a good enough rationale that it won’t be noticed by you or others examining that decision.

(4) Write down those decisions.”

“Right after a bad outcome, especially one due to something outside your control, you can become emotionally compromised. The emotional centers of your brain get aroused, increasing the likelihood that you’ll make poor decisions. When activated, the emotional parts of your brain inhibit the parts of your brain responsible for rational thinking. Shutting down those parts of your brain compromises the quality of any decision you make in that state.

This hot emotional state is called tilt. When on tilt, you’re more likely to make decisions that make a bad situation worse.”

“When you consider how you might respond to negative outcomes in advance of those things happening, you’re likely to think more rationally. It’s easier to come up with the appropriate course of action to take when things don’t go your way before those things go wrong than it is after they go wrong.”

“When you recognize the signs of tilt, ask yourself, “In a week (or a month, or a year), am I going to be happy with any decisions I make right now?””

“When. you imagine faltering and succumbing to the breakroom donut, you can commit in advance that you won’t let one bad decision derail or postpone your goal. This works especially well if you create accountability by declaring your intentions to other people.”

“Access the outside view by asking yourself, “If someone came to me asking my opinion about this kind of decision, what would I need to know to give good advice?”

Build a checklist of relevant details for repeating decisions and make that checklist before you’re in the midst of a decision. Such a list should focus on the applicable goals, values, and resources, along with the details of the situation.”