TED英語演講影片：你會做決定嗎？（含演講稿）

TED是Technology, Entertainment, Design(科技、娛樂、設計)的縮寫，這個會議的宗旨是"用思想的力量來改變世界"。TED演講的特點是毫無繁雜冗長的專業講座，觀點響亮，開門見山，種類繁多，看法新穎。而且還是非常好的英語口語聽力練習材料，建議堅持學習。

TED演講影片

影片簡介：

演說者: Liv Boeree

演說題目：

3 lessons on decision-making from a poker champion

撲克冠軍：做決定的三個策略

幸運真的是一件好事情嗎？在做出重要決定時，我們是否應該相信我們的直覺或依賴機率和仔細分析？

在這個簡短的演講中，職業撲克玩家Liv Boeree分享了她從遊戲中學到的三種策略以及我們如何將它們應用到現實生活中。一起來看看吧！

TED演講稿

So I'm a professional poker player, and today, I want to talk about three things that the game has taught me around decision-making that I find apply to everyday life.

我是一名專業撲克玩家，今天，我想談一談牌局教給我的可以應用於日常決策的三件事。

Now the first of these things is about luck. Now, like poker, life is also a game of skill and luck, and when it comes to the biggest things we care about — health, wealth and relationships — these outcomes don't only depend on the quality of our decision-making, but also the roll of life's dice. For example, we can be perfectly health-conscious and still get unlucky with something like cancer. Or we can smoke 20 a day and live to a ripe old age, and this kind of ambiguity can make it hard for us to know how good our strategies are, sometimes, especially when we're experiencing a lot of success.

第一個就是運氣。生活就像撲克遊戲，需要技巧和運氣，當面對我們最關心的事情—— 健康，財富，和人際關係，其結果都不只跟我們做決定的質量有關，也取決於生活中的運氣。例如，我們在非常注重健康的情況下，也仍然會不幸患上癌症。或者一天抽20只煙，也能同樣活到99，這種模糊性有時候讓我們很難判斷我們的策略究竟有多好，尤其在經歷了多次成功之後。

For example, back in 2010, I won a really big poker tournament known as the European Poker Tour. And because I'd only been playing full-time for about a year, when I won, I assumed I must be rather brilliant. In fact, I thought I was so brilliant that I not only got rather lazy with studying the game, but I also got more risky, started playing in the biggest tournaments I could against the very best in the world. And then my profit graph went from a thing of beauty to something kind of sad, with this worrying downhill trend for a long time, until I finally realized that I was overestimating my skill level, and got my act together.

比如說，在2010年時，我贏得了一場真正意義上的撲克錦標賽，歐洲撲克巡迴賽。再加上我當時僅僅全職玩了一年的撲克，獲勝之後，我覺得我一定非常聰明。事實上，我覺得自己已經如此聰明瞭，所以不僅懶得去鑽研遊戲，還開始變得喜歡冒險，開始參加我能參加的最大的比賽，與最強大的對手對決。然後我的利潤圖表從讓人賞心悅目，變得有些慘不忍睹，並且這種令人擔憂的下行趨勢持續了很長時間，直到我最終意識到，我高估了自己的水平，並開始重振旗鼓。

And this kind of reminds me of what we've been seeing in the cryptocurrency space, at least in 2017, where the only thing that's been going up faster than the markets themselves is the number of "senior investment specialists" who have been appearing out of nowhere. Now I'm not saying it's not possible to have a strategic edge, but at the same time, it's very easy to feel like a genius when you're in a market that's going up so fast that even the worst strategies are making a profit. So when we're experiencing success, it's important to take a moment to really ask ourselves how much of it is truly down to us, because our egos love to downplay the luck factor when we're winning.

這讓我回想起了在加密貨幣領域的見聞，至少在2017年，唯一比市場本身上升還快的就是不知道從哪裡冒出來的 “高階投資專家”的數量。我不是說不可能有戰略優勢，但與此同時，當你在一個快速上升的市場中，即便操著最爛的策略也能賺錢時，是非常容易感覺自己天賦異稟的。所以當我們在經歷成功時，應該花點時間捫心自問，這次成功中有多少因素真正取決於我們的能力，因為當我們獲勝時，我們的自負感會傾向於淡化運氣成分。

Now, a second thing poker taught me is the importance of quantifying my thinking. When you're playing, you can't just get away with going, "Eh, they're probably bluffing." That's just going to lose you a bunch of money, because poker is a game of probabilities and precision, and so you have to train yourself to think in numbers. So now, whenever I catch myself thinking vaguely about something really important, like, "It's unlikely I'll forget what I want to say in my TED Talk," I now try to estimate it numerically.

第二件撲克教給我的事，是量化自己想法的重要性。當你在牌局上時，不可能就這樣想著， “呃，他們可能是在虛張聲勢。” 這隻會讓你輸很多錢，因為撲克是個關於機率和精確性的遊戲，所以你必須訓練自己用數字思考。所以現在，每當我發現自己在粗略地思考一些非常重要的事情時，比如 “我大概不會在TED演講時忘記自己想要講什麼，” 我現在會嘗試用數字估算它。

Trust me, it helps a lot with the planning process. And the thing is, almost anything that could possibly happen here today, or at any point in the future, can also be expressed as a probability, too.

相信我，這真的對計劃過程有很大的幫助。事實上，什麼事情都有可能在今天或在未來某個時候發生，也可以被表達為機率。

So now I also try to speak in numbers as well. So if someone asks me, "Hey, Liv, do you think you're going to come along to that thing tonight?" instead of just saying to them, "Yeah, probably," I actually give them my best estimate — say, 60 percent. Because — I know that sounds a little odd — but the thing is, I ran a poll on Twitter of what people understand the word "probably" to mean, and this was the spread of answers. Enormous! So apparently, it's absolutely useless at actually conveying any real information.

我也會嘗試把資料用到對話中。如果有人問我， “嗨，麗芙，你今晚會參加麼？” 與其用“可能吧”這樣的方式回覆他們，我會給他們我最好的估計值—— 比如，六成。雖然——我知道這聽著奇怪—— 但關鍵在於，我在推特上對人們如何理解“可能吧”這句話做了個調研，這是答案的分佈情況。十分廣泛！很明顯，在傳達任何重要的資訊時，這個表達是完全沒用的。

So if you guys catch yourselves using these vague words, like "probably" or "sometimes," try, instead, using numbers, because when we speak in numbers, we know what lands in the other person's brain.

所以如果你們抓到自己在用像“大概”或者“有時候”的模糊詞語時，嘗試讓自己用數字，因為我們用數字說話時，我們知道對方會如何理解。

Now, the third thing I want to touch on today is intuition. How often have you seen these kinds of inspirational memes in your Facebook feed?

今天我要講的第三點，是直覺。多少人在Facebook上看到過那些心靈雞湯的圖片？

[Always trust your gut feeling and never second-guess.]

【始終相信你的直覺，不要懷疑自己。】

They're nice, right? It's lovely. Yes. "Trust your soul." Well, they're terrible advice. These are some of the best poker players in the world right now. Do they look like people who live purely off feelings and intuitions?

挺正能量的，對吧？真的挺不錯的。沒錯，”相信你的靈魂。“ 只不過它們都是差勁的建議。這些是世界上最厲害的撲克玩家。他們看著像是完全活在自己的感覺和直覺裡的人嗎？

Look at them! Obviously, these guys are about slow, careful analysis, and that's because the game has outgrown the days where pure street smarts and people-reading can get you to the top. And that's because our intuitions aren't nearly as perfect as we'd like to believe. I mean, it'd be great, whenever we're in a tough spot, to just have an answer appear to us from some magical source of inspiration. But in reality, our gut is extremely vulnerable to all kinds of wishful thinking and biases.

看看他們！很明顯，這些人憑藉的是緩慢，縝密的分析，因為現在的牌局已經不像當年，靠著純粹的草根智慧和看人能力就能讓你到達頂峰。這是因為我們的直覺並沒有我們想象中的那麼完美。當然了，如果每次深陷難處之時，都能靈光一現，讓問題迎刃而解，那就再好不過了。但現實中，我們的直覺極容易受到一廂情願的想法和偏見的影響。

So then, what is our gut good for? Well, all the studies I've read conclude that it's best-suited for everyday things that we have lots and lots of experience in, like how we just know that our friend is mad at us before we've even said anything to them, or whether we can fit our car into a tight parking spot. But when it comes to the really big stuff, like what's our career path going to be or who should we marry, why should we assume that our intuitions are better calibrated for these than slow, proper analysis? I mean, they don't have any data to be based off.

那麼，我們的直覺究竟擅長什麼呢？在我看過的所有研究中，都總結出了直覺最適合於那些我們有豐富經驗的事情上，比如我們在跟朋友溝通前，就知道他們在生我們的氣，或者我們能不能把車停到一個非常小的車位上。但在做重大決定時，比如我們的職業規劃或挑選結婚物件時，我們為什麼要相信直覺會比慢節奏，適當的分析更適合處理這些問題呢？我意思是，直覺沒有任何資料來支撐。

So my third lesson is, while we shouldn't ignore our intuitions, we shouldn't overprivilege them either. And I'd like to summarize these three lessons today with my own set of memes, with more of a poker-player twist.

所以我學到的第三件事就是：我們不應該忽視我們的直覺，但也不應該過分重視它們。我現在想要從一名撲克玩家的角度來總結一下這三個經驗。

"Success is sweetest when you achieve it across a large sample size."

“透過大樣本量獲得的成功才是最甜美的。”

"Your gut is your friend and so is a cost-benefit analysis.

”直覺是你的朋友，成本效益分析也同樣。”

"The future is unknown, but you can damn well try and estimate it."

“未來是未知的，但是你可以努力的嘗試並且評估它。”

Thank you.

謝謝。