I came upon this book when I read Stuart Firestein’s interview
with Annie Duke in Nautilus magazine. The interview got me curious about the
ideas in this book and I was fascinated by Annie Duke’s unusual background: being
both a psychology graduate student at one time and a successful poker player.
Graduate studies I know about, professional poker playing I did not. So the
unique combination piqued my interest.
It was a fortuitous digression from my usual list of topics.
Ms. Duke has a clear and eloquent voice and she has a way of explaining the
same points in various ways so that she conveys the essential points which
translates to understanding without seeming pedantic. She obviously knows the
poker world, but it is remarkable how comfortably she steps into the academic mode
without any noticeable change of pace. The book is loaded with references,
other sources, and it is very well notated, no doubt a remnant of Ms. Duke’s
academic training.
The tone of the book is very practical, it is a business
book on decision making without reading like a business book, and I mean that
as a foremost compliment.
The theme of the book is obviously noted in the subtitle:
Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts. Ms Duke lays out
her case in six succinct and information filled factors. The first two chapters
are her problem statement and her light primer on the poker worls, she never
gets bogged down in the intricacies of playing poker professionally, as she
states in her introduction: This Is Not A Poker Book. She does yeoman work in
trying to convince the reader that this poker player point of view is a valid
one for all decision makers to adopt and apply regardless of our lot in life.
In fact she does this throughout the book in unobtrusive but obvious ways. The
next four chapters are a combination of how the betting mindset and probability
frame of reference help the decision maker and how to go about adopting that
frame of reference. In these four chapters she makes a cogent argument about
the benefits of thinking in bets. Much of the reason for adopting this mental
tool comes from the fact that we humans are disastrously biased in our decision
making. We fool ourselves into believing our beliefs whether they are worthy of
our trust of not. This, of course, is not anything new. Daniel Kahneman and
Amos Tversky has laid the ground work for that work, Ms Duke makes use of their
argument to support her case, but the uniqueness of her attack is that she is
able to lay out a “how” component to the discussion on decision making.
Ms Duke uses her professional poker player circle of support
network and what they do in order to check their own egos and false conclusions
as an example and gives us a look at what they do to make sure their decision
making is objective and accurate. She
delves into how our inability and unwillingness to deal with uncertainty sends
our thinking into erroneous conclusions and our own egos forces us into drawing
wrong conclusions about the real reason for our own successes and failures. We
will always attribute our success to our skills and our failures to bad
fortune. She lays out the tools necessary for a decision maker to call
themselves out when they start thinking in this ways.
Remarkably, the process that Ms Duke lays out aligns nicely
with the Stoic philosophy, particularly with regard to dealing with uncertainty
and the dichotomy of control which Stoics espouses. That exact point is notable
in Ms Duke’s narrative.
The final chapter: An Adventure in Time Travel was
especially entertaining and educational as she lays out the framework for an
open-minded process of examining our problems and decision making regarding
those problems. I am quite eager to apply this process in my own life now, as
Ms Duke is quite convincing in her argument.
One point I need to make is that as I looked over my notes
from the book, I realize that Ms Duke had repeated quite a few of her points.
Usually I would attribute that practice to an author who had run out of things
to say, as that is something that is easily discernable. In this case however,
the repetition is written in such a way to reinforce the previous accounting of
the concept and it manifests itself naturally and unobtrusively in the
narrative. In fact, I would not have noticed until I saw that I had the same
point written down multiple times, which means that I had noted the importance
of those points multiple times, which in hindsight meant that the repetition was
not only necessary but critical.
I am hoping that Ms Duke would follow this book with a
deeper dive into the dynamics of her process and the intimate social dynamics
of her CUDOS group. She already did a very succinct description of her group
but I think an examination of the CUDOS group method as applied to different
groups focused on different types of problems and existing in different milieus
would be very good.
I obviously liked the book.
