The first half of this book is very interesting, and includes many fun anecdotes from the life of a professional poker player. The second half is classic psychology material that is found in many other similar books: diversity helps consensus, allowing for dissent within teams helps them move towards the truth, our remembered experience is different from our experience, and learning when you’re on “tilt”.
The novel takeaway from this book is that everyone becomes less biased when they’re placing bets. Putting money where our mouth is really does improve our sense of truth seeking. Makes you wonder why this trick isn’t used more frequently in the world of business? From the sounds of it, the change is just beginning (with betting markets inside businesses).
Favourite quotes:
“Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games, he said, are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what the other person is thinking.”
“Kahan’s findings… discovered that the more numerate people made more mistakes interpreting the data on emotionally charged topics than the less numerate subjects.”
“Experts engaging in traditional peer review, providing their opinion on whether an experimental result would replicate, were right 58% of the time. A betting market in which the traders were the exact same experts and those experts had money on the line predicted correctly 71% of the time.”
3/5.