Why bad decisions have good results sometimes? - My 5 Minutes a Day #51

Shoutout to cocoparisienne and Pixabay.com

Greetings to all on this Tuesday. Today I wanted to talk about an excellent book I am reading: Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, and about a super important concept that explains: How the result of our decisions can be very different from the quality of these.

Everyone remembers a sporting event where a player or coach decides to take a course that is totally reasonable to achieve victory. Then, for reasons of fate, they don't succeed and end up losing.

Hours later, the press and social networks are ready to take their head, criticizing all their decisions without taking into account that they may have been made with the best judgment. This is where the phenomenon of resulting comes in: The tendency of human beings to associate the quality of our decisions with the outcome of these.

If you have a good poker hand, you will assume that you made a good decision and not that you were lucky enough to be dealt the best possible hand. This is a perfect case of resulting. But why does resulting exist?

For this we must go back to our beginning as a species, where we had to be on the lookout for different predators. Associating a strange sound in a bush with a lion about to attack could save your life, and in case it was a false alarm, it was still a much better result than being eaten for not being alert.

This tendency evolved into a cognitive bias and is something we apply without further deliberation.

So why can good decisions have bad outcomes and why can bad ones turn out well?

This is because life is not like chess or checkers, where every strategy will have a fixed outcome. Life is influenced by factors beyond our control which mean that even if you are 99% sure something can happen, 1% can still happen.

Thus, the best alternative to every decision will be to think in probabilities and not in every decision having the best outcome every time. If you have an 80% chance of winning and a 20% chance of losing, the former is more likely. However, don't be upset if you end up losing, since it was within the range of possibilities.

That said, look at life as a game of Poker and not a game of chess.

If you want a more detailed article on this topic, let me know.