YouSaid · the spoken record

Annie Duke

lines on the record: 159
first: 2018-07-25
most recent: 2018-07-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's incredibly helpful. Now, so this is the way that I was trained to think. And I was so sort of entrenched in this world that when you ask me, is that the way you walk around with like some probability assigned to whatever you believe? I'll tell a story that's actually in a chapter note in the book. So it's kind of hidden. I'm sure that most people have seen it, haven't seen it. But I was having lunch with Stuart Feirestein, who's at Columbia. And he actually wrote an amazing book called Ignorance. And actually another book titled Failure. And both of them were about how great all of that is. And he teaches a class at Columbia called Ignorance also, which is the idea that in order for science to proceed, we have to come from”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that that's absolutely true. And I mean, in part because I was. Getting a PhD in science, I think that Much more the way that scientists are sort of trained to think, right? Think that most people think that you construct an experiment to try to prove a hypothesis, but actually you're constructing it to try to disprove it. So it's really approaching the world through this idea of why am I wrong, which I think forces you to understand that there's a possibility that you are, which automatically injects uncertainty into the beliefs. And once you get into poker, obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty, and you can't see the other player's cards. So you understand that you're always working within ranges of kind of guessing about what the other person might hold or about what the proper line of play is. Now, people try to impose certainty on that system. That's how you get to something like self-serving bias, which is, you know, every time I win, it's because I'm a genius and every time I lose, it's because I'm unlucky. Because we are certainty cravers. We're really addicted to certainty. My group forced me to really embrace it and really get my arms around it. And I think that.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It shifts, it kind of shifts your identity to a different place. Like your identity now becomes about acknowledging uncertainty, about how good are you at listening to the other side? How good are you at analyzing those things? And it stops that it stops you from having that defensive reaction. And I think naturally it causes you to be agreeable in disagreement because you view the disagreement as helpful now rather than as a threat. It completely reframes the disagreement.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They aren't so entrenched in your beliefs because you aren't declaring that you're certain of those things in the first place, something that poker really teaches you. There is so much uncertainty in that game that in order to come out of it with any kind of emotional stability, you have to get really comfortable with the uncertainty. You have to be okay with it. And then what you learn, and I particularly learn from dealing with people like my brother and Eric Seidel, was that you also have to wrap that into the way that you think about your own beliefs and your own constructs, that you have to be able to hear the other side because otherwise progress can't be made.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not a question of whether maybe both of you have good intentions and are actually trying to reach the goal to the exact same goal, actually. So it gets into this idea of sort of things about the other person and it causes you to be defensive and very dismissive. It causes you to close your mind off. Once you've made this agreement that look, we're all agreeing that our beliefs are under construction, that they're in progress.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It will cause you to be defensive or angry, dismissive. It will cause you to discredit the other person or just decide that in general they aren't worth listening to or they have ill intent. And we can definitely see this on our political discourse, right? So, I mean, I think that generalization is really interesting that two people, let's say that you have two people who have a disagreement about whether free trade is good for the country. You know, it's not, oh, well, we both think that we want the country to be more prosperous and maybe we disagree on how to get there. That's a very agreeable way to have that conversation. No, it's like you're a globalist pig and you don't care about, you know, the working man or your provincial and close-minded and you don't understand the value of economic theory. And neither of the, you know, both of those are attacking the other person's identity.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so one of the issues that we have is that because of this identity that we form, which is really based on the idea that we're smart and we're competent and our beliefs are generally correct and our mental models of the world are good. And we're good decision makers. And the beliefs that we have are true. When somebody disagrees with us, we can very often feel it as an attack on our identity. And when that happens, I think that disagreeableness ensues because when you feel like you're personally being attacked, that the information that is being told to you is a threat, then you will react as if you are threatened.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, whatever. But I think that if you know that you're going to be accountable to a group later, now you can turn that into I catch it a couple minutes later. And that makes all the difference because it gets it in a window where you can actually do something about it. So is your initial feeling going to be biased? Is your initial processing not necessarily going to be the most rational? Maybe. And that might be true for every single time. But how quickly do you go, oh, wait a minute, you know, there's another way to think about that, and that's actually really irrational. And maybe how fast are you getting to that answer? Are you getting to it when you're 50 and you're looking back on your college days, right? Or are you getting to it, you know, five minutes later, or maybe when you describe the situation to the group, the group helps you get there, you know, so I think that that's actually one of the really big values of the group.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So let's say that because I'm in the learning pod, that 90% of the time I still default to my natural mode, right? The mode that makes people like John Height so skeptical that you can do it on your own, right? So I'm still doing that, that was bad luck and I'm just sort of shunting that off. But if I'm at 90%, I'm catching 10% instead of 5. Think what that will do for your learning. So what I say is that having this group that you're accountable to later means that you're going to catch a few more and you're going to actually not only do that, but you're going to catch them more quickly. So I think we've all, I mean, we can all think about, for example, the stupid decisions we made in college. Yeah, sure. Like, so you have all this time and space to now go look back on this decision that you made, but you've caught it so many years later that like,”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did well, it didn't. I mean, you know, the way that I kind of put it is let's say that there are 100 learning opportunities that kind of pop in front of you and left to your own devices without, say, a good learning pod that you're plugged into. Maybe you catch five of them. Okay, so 95.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't think that even if the group isn't naturally that way, I think that if one person says, hey, I think that this would be a really good way. And those two things are really different. We want to hold each other accountable. We want to make sure that as much as possible that we can disagree without being disagreeable and not be defensive about the whole thing. And let's all agree to that. I think that you can move any group in the right direction. And the great news is that you don't need to be anywhere close to perfect at this. I mean, that's kind of what I was saying in the beginning about one of the things that I loved about poker was that the more that I played, the more it pulled the curtain back on how unsolvable this game really was, that there was so much that I didn't know about the game. But what I understood was this little bit of progress that I was making made a really huge difference. So I would never say that I didn't sit at plenty of tables and think about how unlucky I was getting and moan deeply in my head about the bad beats that I was taking and think about how, oh, I can't believe that. I so outplayed the other play.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different, and somehow, you know, than the other people around us. And that group gave me that. But in a way that was actually really constructive for learning because the difference was around this ability to kind of get past that initial reaction of like, oh, I just got unlucky and on to the more productive exercise of where did I go wrong.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was one of the things that defined that tribe that I was in that made me feel like I was different than the other people around me was when I was walking down the halls of the poker tournament, I was listening to other people say, I can't believe how unlucky I got. And, you know, you're hearing this exchange of bad beat stories. And then I'm going to my group and saying, I can't believe how poorly I played this hand. Can we talk about it? And that now's different, you know, it's making me feel like I'm different, that somehow I'm doing, and particularly somehow I'm doing something difficult, that I am overcoming something natural that other people do and that that makes my, you know, this tribe, you know, special in some way. Look, and I think that we all want to feel special. I think that we are, that's why we are so tribal by nature is that we all do want to feel like we.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not only that, let me just add something to that. I think that, you know, there's all this great work that's done, been done, particularly recently on tribalism. And tribalism as it relates to politics. So there's a great paper actually that just came out recently from Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira out of NYU, which is talking about this. And one of the things they say is that there's a few things that tribes give you. But one of them is actually it gives you the idea that you're different from other people. This is actually an important thing that you get from your tribe. They're obviously talking about it in politics. And I think that that's important. I do think it's important for us to feel like in some way we are different than the other people around us. So one of the things that this group gave me.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you know what's really, really wonderful about that is that because I knew that if I wanted to have a really deep conversation about poker, which was the game I loved with someone who I really admired, when I was playing, I had to process what was happening knowing that this conversation was going to occur later. And so it really helped me when I was away from the group to be looking at the world in a different way through this eye of like, well, I want to have interesting things to ask later”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I just don't want to feel bad about myself that I was wrong. It's hard to have a reward that's in the long term. It's hard to say, well, my reward is that, you know, five years from now, I'll be such a better decision maker. And no, we want a reward now. Like, I don't think that we should try to short circuit that need for some sort of immediate gratification. It's just, what are you getting the gratification from? And if you set up a really good group, the gratification is from the group. They're giving you approval for that kind of thinking. So now all of a sudden, being a really good credit giver gets people to, you know, reinforce you. Being a good mistake admitter, like it gets people to reinforce you, you know, not telling bad beat stories.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We weren't going to tolerate this type of talk for me. So I needed to go to them with questions. And now I would go to them and say something like, well, I won this hand, but I think I really butchered it. And it would be like their face would light up. I mean, it would be the opposite of what happened when I went up to Eric with the Bad Beat story. Now it was like this huge smile on his face and total engagement with me to talk about that. What happens is that when you set up that kind of group agreement and you really live it, the group is actually reinforcing those kinds of behaviors. So, you know, you can think about habit formation, right? It's that you need to have this reward. And the reward could be this short-term feeling of”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted him to approve of me. I wanted him to think that I was worth talking to, that I had interesting things about say about the game. I wanted him to engage with me. And I think that right there is the key in answering your question of how do you deal with the pain. And I think it depends on what you decide the goal of the game is. I think that a social group can act as the best piece of cheese ever. Like if we go back to the rat going through the maze, getting you to think that I'm worthwhile to talk to, that feels really good. So Eric, my brother, Dan Harrington, you know, David Gray, John Hennegan, these people who I really wanted to think well of me.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, I mean, first of all, when Eric said that to me, I was really sad. Like, I think I almost cried. It was horrible. Like, I felt so rejected in that moment.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He told me he was going to hold me accountable to that. That if I wanted to come and talk to him and have an exchange with him, that I was going to have to come to him with a real question and he was going to hold me accountable to the way that I was processing information in the world and check me on it and that I had to be willing to listen to him disagree with me. And that was all. It was such a nice, concise way to put that. And when you look at, you know, for example, like Phil Tellock's work, you can see that this is what his research has shown. You need in these groups in order to move the group away from this confirmatory style of thought into this exploratory style of thought.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work for me because I'm a woman and he's a man. And so the perceptions of us were very different at the table. So, for example, his ability to bluff in a situation might be really different than my ability to bluff. So we might come to different conclusions about what the right strategy there was because we were different people. So essentially if you can get the group, I mean, Eric really put it really well in that. He sort of told me what the contract was that I had to agree to in order to be able to talk to him. So when he said, you know, is there a point to the story? He's telling me that my goal has to be accuracy. So what he's saying is I don't want to hear you reason to be right. I want you to reason to be accurate. To be right would just be I'm going to affirm my priors, to be accurate would be to try to take these beliefs that are in progress and try to move them toward whatever the accurate representation of the objective truth was.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that will actually cause people to move even more extreme. It's like interacting with a bunch of clones of yourself and you sort of become yourself on steroids in the extreme. Now what we're doing instead is in a group form saying, no, we're not going to tolerate that. And what we're actually going to try to do is try to create a more accurate mental model of the world that we're going to agree that there's some sort of objective truth. We're all going to agree that our beliefs are in progress and under construction in some way and that our goal is to help each other try to construct better models of the world and included in that is that we understand that we may disagree with each other and that's okay that we may actually have different values. So the right answer for you might be different than the right answer for me. The example I would give for poker is that strategies that might work for Eric Seidel might not”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of two ways that groups can interact with each other. One would be a confirmatory style of thought. So that would be the I'm so sad you agree with me. You tell me you're so sad and we both agree that everybody plays poker horribly and we're really great and everything we believe about the game is true and when we lose it's because of bad luck. So that would be a confirmatory style. You can see this in a lot of political thinking, right? Just pick your example. They're all confirming each other. But the other kind of style and the style that Eric Seidel was demanding of me is an exploratory style of thought, which is not we're trying to confirm what we already believe and sort of think about how great we are, which in a group form is the same as that identity protective cognition. It says now we have a group of people who are trying to protect a collective.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Story, and then you tell me yours. What if our deal is I'm going to spot your bias and you'll spot mine and we'll have each other's back. So to take kind of Tetlock's Phil Tetlock's way that he sort of divides these.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, you know, Phil Tetlock, for example. I mean, he, you know, he's just very skeptical to John Hytte. They're all very skeptical that you can do much about this on your own and that you really need to be in a good group in order to overcome this kind of bias. And I think that it's very actually intuitive to think about why that is. When you're looking at other people, I mean, how often are you saying, wow, you're just really biased? I can't believe you came to that conclusion. Like you're completely missing this point or you're discrediting that person on purpose or you're giving too much credit to this person or you're clearly overconfident. It's so easy to spot in other people and so hard to spot in ourselves. So if you take that, that will okay, it's pretty easy to spot in other people. Now, well, what if we got together with some other people? And let's make a deal, right? Instead of the deal of, I'll tell you my bad beats.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that it's a few things. I think one is that once they know about the bias, then they're overconfident in thinking that they're avoiding things like overconfidence. But two is that the smarter you are, the better you are at kind of slicing and dicing the data in order to fit whatever your prior is. And you can slice and dice it to tell a story that doesn't sound biased. So you'll say things like, you know, I was really trying to think, though, if this was just me rationalizing my prior belief. And I've come to the conclusion, no, and here's why. And when you're, you know, when you're really adept at that kind of spin, which you have to be more intelligent to be able to do, you can actually cut the data in a way or present it in a way that really fits the story that you want. You're just better at it. And it's not that you're lying, by the way. You're just better at fooling yourself. So, you know, when you talk to somebody.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think that Eric Seidel really exemplifies what you need in a good group. So the conclusion that I come to in the book, not by the way, on my own, but because this is the general consensus in the research, is that on our own, we're just biased and we just have this very natural tendency to process the world in a way that supports our priors. Even if you know about it, even if I tell you that you're going to do these biased things, you'll still do them. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that says that smart people who know about them are actually worse.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think he actually told me I was being annoying. And it was funny because I read him the section in the book where I talk about this particular conversation because I just want to like clear it with him. I was like, oh, by the way, I just want you to know that I've got this section in the book. So let me read you what I said. I think I softened it slightly for the book. And he said. Oh, I hope I said that. He was very excited.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to make an agreement, right? I'm going to get to tell you my emotional hard luck situation, and then you'll tell me yours, and we'll make each other feel better about how unfair the world is to us. And now we can both walk away feeling pretty good about ourselves. What was interesting with Eric was going to have none of that normal social contract. And he was actually really harsh with me. And what he said was, I'm going to paraphrase, but it was something like, why are you telling me this story? Like, do you think I really want to hear this? Okay, I've lost with a lot of hands too. I've heard so many bad beat stories. I have no interest in yours whatsoever. If you really lost because of bad luck, what's the point of the story? There's nothing that you can learn from it. Now, if you have a question, like if you want to talk about strategy, like I don't care whether you won or lost the hand. Like we'll sit down and talk about strategy, but don't just come up and tell me about bad luck. You're like literally wasting my time and it's annoying.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And his response was very different than other people's responses, who I had told such bad beat stories to. With other people, generally they nodded and sympathized and then told me a bad beat story back. Kind of”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, mentally. Obviously, anybody considered a poker table with anyone, and I had said it, I want to mentally sit at the table with you. So I remember going up to him after some tough loss and saying something, just something to the effect of I can't believe I lost. I was playing so well and that guy got really lucky and I got unlucky. And, you know, the kind of things that you say, I was telling him basically what you call a bad beat story. And it usually goes something like, I had aces. And then you can fill in all the blanks to, and then a guy hit a lucky card and I lost. So that's a bad beat story. So I was telling him a bad beat story. And these are, if you go into a poker room, you'll hear like a gazillion of these in the space of about one second.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was a friend of my brother's. And he was in New York, and I met him because he was playing in these games with my brother. And so that was just, you know, I knew him just as, you know, my brother's friend. 10 years later now I become a poker player and now I'm encountering him as okay I would like you to be my peer right so now it's different it's like oh I don't know you're not just like my buddy where I've become your friends through friend through my brother But now I want you to be my peer.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So getting back to why I feel so lucky that I got plugged into Eric Seidel. I had a conversation with Eric Seidel very early on. So my history of there, because I met him when I was 16 long before I was playing poker, when my brother first started.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Luckin poker. I lose all the time when I have the best hand, and I know that I have the best hand because the cards are face up. I can see that I had the best hand and a very unlucky card happened. So I can just start pawning it off to bad luck that, you know, the game was really good and I was playing great and everybody else was playing really poorly and I just had a really bad run of cards. Now what you've done there is you've socialized the result to the world. You've offloaded responsibility for this bad outcome to the world. Now in the short run, that feels good because you don't need to do any kind of like identity update. You don't need to update your beliefs in any kind of way or say that those beliefs were wrong or that you made poor choices or that you caused these things to happen, but it's devastating to learning”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the long run, it's going to help me learn because I'm going to go in and I'm going to examine my decisions. I'm going to see where maybe I could have improved, where I could have made a better decision that would have increased the likelihood that I had a better outcome. So I'm going to trade that off. I'm going to take that short-term hit. But in the long run, I'm going to feel better about myself. And I'll obviously have a more positive narrative of my life story over the long run if I'm willing to do that. Or the choice too is I don't want to feel pain right now. And it seems like people really take that discount. They are totally willing to discount in the present in order to preserve that self-narrative, to take a huge discount in the present. And what they do is exactly what you just said. Well, okay, if I don't want to take the hit and I lost, what am I supposed to do? Oh, right. There's a lot of...”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's basically what ends up happening. So the pain is the double-edged sword. We need the pain. We need the, well, I guess a very popular phrase at the moment is skin in the game. We need the skin in the game in order to learn in this particular case. But it's that very fact that you're losing maybe because of your own decisions that doesn't feel good to us, that makes us feel like our identity is being attacked. So now we have a choice, right? We can say, Well, in the long run, I have to take the pain. Because my long run goal is to become a better player and to learn. By the way, whatever it is, whether it's poker or sales or business or relationships or, you know, ordering better food at a restaurant, you know, going to the gym, whatever it might be. So we have to be able to say, okay, I'm willing to take this short-term pain, this feeling that doesn't feel very good because I know.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if we think about, for example, like, you know, Kahneman talks about this. He says that we're all trying to create this positive narrative of our life story. You know, Dan Cahan talks about identity, protective cognition, that this is really how we're processing the world is to protect this identity that we have. And with the pain, which is the loss, our identity gets attacked if we're going to attribute it to our poor decision-making.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That for what you will, but I think that they really speeded my learning up because they really taught me some things about how to sort through this system. So, I think that the thing that gets in the way of most learning, and I think that you can see this pretty clearly at the poker table, is something that you said, which is the pain. So it's this double-edged sword. It's like a catch-22. You need the pain in order for it to matter to you so that you'll learn. But the pain actually gets in the way of learning. And why is that? When you're losing, it just lights your limbic system up. I mean, it does not feel good to lose. And what particularly doesn't feel good about losing when you're playing in a game or doing anything where you could possibly attribute your losing to your own decision. So these are decisions you've made based on your mental model of the world, based on the beliefs that you have. That makes us, that's really we view as an attack on our identity.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that I was really lucky in the sense of, well, I mean, it's kind of interesting because I wouldn't have become a professional poker player if my brother hadn't brought me into it. And my brother had already landed in this group of incredible players that among them have many, many, many world championships. I mean, they all went on to be top performers. In particular, someone named Eric Seidel, who has a bunch of World Series of Poker bracelets. I mean, a big poker champion. He's earned $38 million playing poker. He is amazing. And he's also one of the most rational and clear thinkers that I have ever come across. And so I would say that was very lucky to be plugged into that group. Of course, it's weird because I wouldn't have been playing poker if it weren't for that group.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're sort of constructing what we think the objective truth is. It helps us to predict things like people's actions or if I turn right, I'm going to see this particular thing here. That's what we're always doing is modeling the world so that we can act in it with intention.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when we're talking about mental models, there's the world out there. There's some objective, let's agree that there's some objective reality. And all we have is our beliefs about that objective reality. So what we're doing is constructing a model of the world. So for example, I mean, we can think about something that's simple and sort of very scientific, is that I have this in my head, I have this idea about gravity and how it works. And that's a model of why things stay on the ground and, you know, two rocks fall at the speed that they do and whatnot. And so that would be a model of how that works that's, you know, in physics. But we have models of the world as well. We all walk around with models of mental models of the world. So that's what we're trying to do is create a model of the world that predicts for us, predicts sort of what's true in the world.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A place I just saw it was in Richard Thaler's misbehaving. And he's got it right there pretty early in the book, like this sentence about how you learn.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was painful because they're losing money. Exactly. And yet, they weren't learning. And I think that that was the thing that really confused me. It is so instilled in every person who's studying psychology. I mean, it's in your psych one textbook right there. Here's this thing. You know, actually”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had really clearly stalled at some point in their learning about the game, probably about 39 years before that, and had persisted in these strategies that, you know, I obviously had the help of great mentors that could reveal to somebody who was that new to the table some of the strategic errors that I was seeing, but that seemed pretty obvious. And they were getting feedback for it. I mean, they weren't winning. And as I continued to play poker, I noticed this over and over again that people really persisted in their mistakes despite the fact that there was very clear feedback that was very quick and there was a lot of it.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, and I think that this is a pretty, you know, I mean, obviously that's a pretty sort of Pavlovian or scanarian view of the world, right? You put a rat in a box and it runs a maze and at the end there's some cheese and then it figures out that it runs the maze faster. So it's this decisions, actions, outcomes, rewards or punishment or pain. I guess we could look at it through that lens as well. And that that's when learning occurs. When you've got lots of that stuff going on. And I remember, I mean, just before I was ever thinking about it in any explicit way, I did have this puzzle immediately as I sat down at the table. You know, I was playing with people who were much older than I was. You know, most of them were probably 40 years older than I was, had been playing for that much longer than I had.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the key thing that I learned was that it's not as simple, I think, as they kind of make it sound when you get your Psych One textbook. So I think every Psych One textbook has a sentence that's something like this. Learning occurs when there's lots and lots of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions. Well, in pain, yes. You have to have consequences”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A model of your opponent? How are you figuring out what the right strategy against that is? How for yourself are you picking the signal out in this very noisy stream of stuff that's happening? And I think that that was very helpful and I think it really actually speeded up my learning that I had that background.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Psychology, clinical psychology is a very small slice of it. And I don't know very much about clinical psychology. What I know about is cognition. So what I realized is that all of the work that I'd done in really understanding how people make decisions, cognitive bias, how do people construct mental models of the world? How do people learn in really uncertain systems, which is really what I was trying to figure out with syntactic bootstrapping, is how do you create what's the choice architecture there that narrows down the possibilities enough for a child that they could actually conceivably pick a word out of the sound stream and figure out what it means, which is actually a really hard problem. So I realized that all of that thinking that I was doing in that space was actually really informing the way that I thought about poker because I really approached it from this decision making problem, right? How are you constructing?”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's something that I think is really interesting that I actually have lots to say about that now, but I think that that all revealed itself to me later as I went along. I think that it particularly revealed itself to me when I started talking on these topics that really eventually ended up as thinking and bets as the book. I started talking on these topics in 2002. I started realizing how much of what I had done in graduate school had informed what I was doing at the poker table. Now, one of the interesting things is that when you say that you studied psychology or went to graduate school in psychology, people think that you're talking about clinical psychology. And so people actually think, oh, you must know a lot about people's like personalities in the sense of, you know, depressed or I'm going to do psychoanalytic analysis on you or something like that. But most of what psychology is is actually in this space of experimental.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, you have to do it very fast. And then you have to sort of try to figure out after the fact, you know, after memory has gotten in the way. It's a really fascinating problem. And I felt like it was kind of this. Coming together of all of these issues that I was studying when I was in graduate school about how you learn in this really practical kind of real world and time pressured environment that was super cool. So I totally love that. And I think that that I got really infatuated that with that Sitting in a basement bar in Montana, you know, that part of it was not so fun, but the game was definitely worth it for me.”
2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT