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Review: Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
Mar. 13th, 2026 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
knave_of_swords
I decided to finally DNF this one, at about 55% of the way through. It was just getting too repetitive, and the next two chapters explicitly was about how to build a 'truthseeking pod' or something and I was just done.
There are a lot of good ideas here, but I'm not really someone who needs to hear most of them. Most of the lessons talked about in the book are things that my parents already taught me, or that I learned through my own experience. As someone who has examined the foundation of nearly every belief that I had, and then decided that those beliefs were based on falsehoods— as someone who grew up in mormonism, confronted the evidence that mormonism was not true, and rejected mormonism as a result— very little of what this book talks about is new to me. The ideas are mostly sound, to be sure, but they aren’t useful or helpful to me because I’ve already internalized them to the degree that I’m aware of them affecting my decision making. I won’t say I’m perfect at it, but the goal of the book seems largely to call attention to irrational decision processes and what causes them, because awareness of the problem helps in fixing the problem. I’m already aware, and have in fact already made some very difficult decisions in favor of truth seeking. It's a continuous process, but this book is aimed more towards 'beginners' in this area, which I am not.
It's also more aimed at business people and feels more self-helpy than I prefer. This book did make me think about some things, but as I said above, it mostly told me things that I already was aware of. I did like the idea of explicitly treating decisions as bets on probabilities.
Honestly what compelled me the most was the fleeting bits of discussion about poker strategy; this book has piqued my interest in poker and now I want to learn how to play. It's not a poker book, to be clear, that was just what ended up being the most interesting part to me.
I don't disagree with most things this book says, but it just felt very basic to me. Maybe there's some CEO out there who really needs to hear that sometimes you get lucky without doing anything to deserve it, or that you can get a negative outcome without doing anything wrong, but I for one learned those things from my parents long ago. I'm glad that this book exists for the people who need to learn from it; I'm just not one of those people.
Would I recommend this book? Maybe to an aspiring CEO who never learned how to be introspective. I think most people, though, will get about as much out of the book as they would get out of a short summary of it.
Unfortunately, not an auspicious start to my audiobook journey. Now I need to figure out what to listen to on my work commute instead...
