[ericdykstra]

This article, like Duke's book, has a solid premise, but fails to provide any actionable advice aside from a simple risk/reward framework. When I read the book, I was hoping there would be more information about how to properly handicap various situations, but there just wasn't.

Business and life decisions aren't as simple as calculating pot odds and outs. Anyone who has estimated a complex and unfamiliar programming task knows that the unknown-unknowns are the biggest part of any equation.

[theincredulousk]

The largest fault in the practical (life) applications of probabilistic thinking is that estimating the odds in real-time is often impossible. Poker is a constrained environment where the odds are computable.

It's a useful framework for thinking in various situations, but it is almost never going to reduce to an equation that can tell you some objectively correct answer or decision.

[kqr]

If the main reason your effort estimations are off is that you don't allow for unknown unknowns, then that's easily fixable.

After all, although we don't know which the unknown unknowns are, the possibility of them is known. And they do, in my experience, tend to increase the required effort by, say, 1--30 × depending on task complexity and familiarity.

So even in the most complex and unfamiliar of tasks, you can adjust the upper end of your estimate by 30× and there you go! Unknown unknowns accounted for in your effort estimation.

(Simpler or more familiar tasks require smaller adjustments to their upper end. Knowing how much adjustment is appropriate is a matter of deliberate practise.)