You also become more compassionate toward other people when you treat fielding outcomes as bets. When you look at the outcomes of others from their perspective, you have to ask yourself, “What if that had happened to me?” You come up with more compassionate assessments of other people where bad things aren’t always their fault and good things aren’t always luck. You are more likely to walk in their shoes. Imagine how Bartman’s life would have changed if more people worked to think this way.
The hard way
Thinking in bets is hard, especially initially. It has to start as a deliberative process, and will feel clunky, weird, and slow. Certainly, there will be times it doesn’t make sense. Like if you don’t get a promotion at work, you’re probably going to wonder how you’re supposed to feel better acknowledging that so-and-so was more deserving and that you could learn a lot from them. It takes work to avoid the temptation to blame it on the boss being a jerk who doesn’t know how to evaluate talent.
That feeling is natural. I built my poker career out of these principles of learning and truthseeking, yet I still catch myself falling into the self- serving bias and motivated reasoning traps. Duhigg tells us that reshaping a habit requires time, preparation, practice, and repetition.
Look at other kinds of habit changes. If I had a habit of getting out of bed at midnight to eat a cookie, it takes work as well as will to change that habit. I have to identify the habit I want to change, figure out the routine to substitute, and practice that routine in deliberative mind until the habit is reshaped. I would need to stock apples in the house, and keep them more readily available than cookies. Then I need to actually eat the apple at midnight instead of reaching for the cookie, repeating this routine until it becomes a new habit. That takes work and willpower and time.
Despite the difficulties, striving for accuracy through probabilistic thinking is a worthwhile routine to pursue. For one thing, it won’t always be so difficult. We have to start doing this with deliberation and effort, but it eventually becomes a habit of mind. Just like declaring uncertainty in your
beliefs, it eventually goes from a somewhat goofy and awkward extra step to a habit integral to how you view the world around you.
To be sure, thinking in bets is not a miracle cure. Thinking in bets won’t make self-serving bias disappear or motivated reasoning vanish into thin air. But it will make those things better. And a little bit better is all we need to transform our lives. If we field just a few extra outcomes more accurately, if we catch just a few extra learning opportunities, it will make a huge difference in what we learn, when we learn, and how much we learn.
Poker’s compressed version of real-world decision-making showed me how being a little better at decision-making could make a big difference. A poker game can consist of a few hundred hands. Every hand can require up to twenty decisions. If, over the course of a game, there were a hundred outcomes that provided learning opportunities and we caught ten of them, we would still be missing 90% of our chances to learn. We wouldn’t have transcended the way our brains function and built ourselves a different brain, but we don’t need to. If our opponents are people like Nick the Greek, they are missing almost every learning opportunity. We’re obviously going to do better than they do just catching 10%. If another of our opponents is someone just like us, but who isn’t working to transform their outcome-processing routines, maybe they (this prior version of ourselves) will pick up five opportunities. Again, we are missing 90%, and we are still going to clean up on an opponent who is trying to learn but doesn’t know how.* The benefits of recognizing just a few extra learning opportunities compound over time. The cumulative effect of being a little better at decision-making, like compounding interest, can have huge effects in the long run on everything that we do. When we catch that extra occasional learning opportunity, it puts us in a better position for future opportunities of the same type. Any improvement in our decision quality puts us in a better position in the future. Think of it like a ship sailing from New York to London. If the ship’s navigator introduces a one-degree navigation error, it would start off as barely noticeable. Unchecked, however, the ship would veer farther and farther off course and would miss London by miles, as that one-degree miscalculation compounds mile over mile. Thinking in bets corrects your course. And even a small correction will get you more safely to your destination.
The first step is identifying the habit of mind that we want to reshape and how to reshape it. That first step is hard and takes time and effort and a lot of missteps along the way. So the second step is recognizing that it is easier to make these changes if we aren’t alone in the process. Recruiting help is key to creating faster and more robust change, strengthening and training our new truthseeking routines.