Incomplete information and over-estimation
- Much of what you need to know in life is hidden from you. You need to make decisions, but is still the victim of chance or uncertainty.
- We tend to over-estimate the role of our own skills. The more people overestimate the importance of their own ability, the less flexible their decision making becomes.
MORE IDEAS FROM THE ARTICLE
To avoid the trap of overestimating our own skill, we need to start thinking probabilistically. That means estimating the odds and adapting your decision-making accordingly.
Even if the decision had a good outcome, we still need to objectively analyse the quality of the decision-making underneath.
Tilting means realizing that your emotions are not separate from the logic of your decision making - for example, the despair that comes from bad luck, or the overconfidence that comes from a win.
You can learn to cope better by regularly checking in with yourself to see what you are feeling and how you react. Once you have identified those feelings, then try to analyse how they're influencing your judgment.
A poor understanding of good or bad luck can derail the decision making of bankers, judges, and athletes. Being aware of probability will prevent you from reading too much into random events, or 'spotting' trends when there are none.
In the current pandemic, where governments design policies based on limited data, we could all do with a better understanding of uncertainty and how to think about it under pressure.
RELATED IDEAS
Maria Konnikova, in her soon to be published book The Biggest Bluff, tells us that Poker is a real game, closer to life as opposed to the modern games which try to ‘game’ our brains’ and exploit its weaknesses.
Poker pushes us out of our comfort zones and illusions and puts us where life is, unpredictable, and always with fifty-fifty odds.
People have a natural tendency to conflate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. They're not the same thing.
You can make a smart, rational choice but still get poor results. That doesn't mean you should have made a different choice; it simply means that other factors (such as luck) influenced the results.
You cannot control outcomes; you can only control your actions.
- We all have some sort of model(s) of how the world works and what's true and what's not
- That's what we're always doing - building models so we can act in it with intention