Annie Duke

As with most advice books, your mileage will likely vary depending on how many of the behaviours prescribed you already engage in, and/or whether you find the strategies herein useful for yourself.

Respectively, I tend to do many of the things Duke advocates for automatically (adjust for risk, discount skill effects on the past, keep an eye on the future), and so while I unreservedly recommend that section to anybody who feels like this sounds helpful for them, it wasn't necessarily my jam. Her strategies for assisting other people in doing this and for making them complicit in improving my own decision-making are pretty great, though, and offered new ideas for me to try. So I am very appreciative of that.

I can't help but feel like this is one of those books that should have been somewhat shorter and was forced up to a certain length by a publisher, but I don't think that is necessarily Duke's fault.

Also, perhaps she is a bit too generous with her estimate of (this) readers' brain-power. She mentions that it is important to learn from every player at the poker table and to not discount anybody because of perceived skill-level - I would have an extremely difficult time learning from more than one player at the poker table simply because I don't have enough mental bandwidth to process more than that.

In any case, especially well worth reading if one wants a self-help book to validate the side of you that thinks more math will improve your life, certainly.… (mehr)

Very thinly stretched content, this is largely about reiterating a few admittedly good points over and over again. Most of the advice boils down to: instead of saying you think something is true or false, ask yourself how sure you are and consider other possibilities, then try to avoid hindsight bias.

That advice then gets re-framed by annecdote and example repeatedly. At one point the idea of a Ulysses contract is explained in about half a page and it's a good, clear explanation. But then it gets re-explained several times for the next two pages. Overall this feels like a corporate seminar presentation excessively padded out to justify the printing of a book.… (mehr)