What I describe as the Rubin questions, because these are questions that I first heard when Bob Rubin would ask them when he led the NEC for Clinton in the 1990s: What might we wish two years from now we had done today? What might we wish ten years now that we had done today? Yes, that decision turned out right, but was it the best decision we could have made then given what we could have known then? Yes, that decision turned out wrong, but was there a better decision we could have made then given what we could have known then, and how could we have made it?: Cory Doctorow: Thinking in Bets: a poker-master's Jedi mind-trick for being less wrong: "Annie Duke... Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts...
...Duke proposes that our own cognitive biases are the biggest impediment to high-quality decisions.... A decision is good if it gave you the highest chance of winning based on the information you had, even if you ended up losing. Mediocre poker players and other normies suffer from "resulting," in which results, not information and reasoning, are used to evaluate decisions. A bad poker player ascribes their losses to "bad luck" and their wins to "skill"—and deploys selective memory, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning to prevent themselves from understanding when they've lucked into an undeserved win and when they've cost themselves money by repeating a bad habit. Duke's answer to this is a lovely shift in perspective: rather than feeling good about yourself for winning (the result), make your self-worth dependent on your process. After every outcome, "workshop" your decision and its aftermath to determine what errors in judgment you made and how you can fix them in future decisions. Make all your sense of accomplishment dependent on how well you execute this process—how many errors you can spot and fix in your choices.
The rest of the book concerns itself with the particulars of this forensic method: how to assemble a "truth-seeking pod"... workshopping methods... drawn from statecraft, corporate boardrooms, the military, poker tables, academia, and other disciplines, and Duke's extensive research offers a wide buffet of techniques to draw on... a sister to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the Scientific Method: using peer-review and after-the-fact comparisons of hypotheses to outcomes to help distinguish truth from self-serving self-delusions, the most pernicious of all our mental habits....
There's an unsupported implication of universality.... The tactics Duke catalogs have worked for many people, but it's not clear whether they'd work for everyone. When you're trying to get your brain to default to good practices, the idiosyncrasies of your temperament, modes of thinking and background are all presumably very important.... With all that said, I recommend this book very highly—not all the tactics may work for you, but there's an arsenal of tactics for you to try, and the strategy of judging your self-worth based on your ability to introspectively discover and fix the flaws in your reasoning (rather than winning) is both laudable and socially beneficial. Duke is an entertaining and charming writer, and she has important insights to share...
#shouldread
