The Poker Hand and Coda (done!)

It seems fitting that Lehrer ends his book with a chapter about the balance between listening to our emotions and relying on rationality. Lehrer discusses the World Series of Poker, where players have to rely on both instinct and rational thought. They must consciously think about their decisions in order to win – they can pull on both probability (rational thought) and their gut instincts (emotions). The player that best handles the delicate balance ends up winning the tournament.

I play Texas Hold 'Em myself, so I looked up how to calculate odds (http://www.texasholdem-poker.com/odds) and betting strategy (http://www.texasholdem-poker.com/how_to_bet). Not surprisingly, neither of the pages talk about feelings or rationality.

Lehrer wraps up the chapter with a list of guidelines that he says will help us make better decisions:

1. Simple problems require reason
2. Novel problems also require reason
3. Embrace uncertainty
4. You know more than you know
5. Think about thinking

I thought that the list was good at essentially summarizing the book. I tried to pick out the most interesting one to blog about, but ultimately I realized they were all equally interesting.

The first point also involves the opposite of the statement, which is that we should follow our emotions when it comes to more difficult situations, such as buying a car. This sounds contradictory, and as I have said before I would be hesitant to adopt such a radical approach to life, but Lehrer does make valid point. The second point also involves reason, but I think this point is common sense. People should always think about new situations instead of allowing feelings to guide them.

Regarding the third point, Lehrer has spent the latter half of the book talking about the dangers of certainty and hubris. He proposes a solution to this by saying that we should be our own devil’s advocate. However, honestly, I wonder how we would ever come to a decision if we kept arguing with ourselves. Lehrer does not answer this question.

His fourth point has to do with the paradoxical nature of the human brain. The truth is, we don’t know our own brains that well. Sometimes we gain things through experience that we don’t really know we gained. Patterns and other such things are the strength of our emotional brain, which has been trained through experience.

Before Lehrer brought up these five points, he spent the chapter talking about the fifth point. Up until this point, I had trouble understanding what he meant by thinking about our own thought process. However, when I read this part, it became clearer. Lehrer wants us to think about the decision that we are making at the moment and be aware of what kind of thought process would best suit it. For example, we can avoid loss aversion because we now know that the brain looks at losses differently from gains. Finally, Lehrer ends the chapter by saying that the best decision makers learn from their mistakes, and learn not to make them again. Through these mistakes, we can learn to make better decisions in the future. I feel that this is the most valuable piece of information that I could have taken from How We Decide.

I really like how Lehrer ended the book. He brought it full circle, from where he started the book with a description of a simulated plane flight to the end, where he used a plane’s cockpit to symbolize our emotional and rational brains. In the cockpit, the autopilot is the emotional brain, trained to do their jobs without conscious thought. The pilots are the prefrontal cortex, or the rational brain, and monitor the autopilot in case anything goes wrong. These two systems work together in equilibrium, using each of their advantages to correct their respective mistakes. Lehrer uses this model to demonstrate how our brains should ideally work – with a little self-awareness, we can use each respective part of our brains in the right context.

Last post with review coming up soon!

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