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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “And then within that context of all that uncertainty trying to come out what is the optimal play I mean I can just sit in that kind of problem forever.”

    2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “No, this is poker. So, yeah, so you're essentially just sort of like pulling back, you know, the curtain on how incredibly complex this game is, which I think is like, I think that's really fascinating. It's this really fascinating exercise in how do you kind of slog your way through such an uncertain system. Outcomes and decisions are so loosely linked in that game. I mean, you know, you have the best hand, you get crushed, you have the worst hand, you win sometimes, and there's so much hidden information. The cards are face down. And how are you supposed to figure out, you know, kind of get into the process and figure out and, you know, sort of separate yourself from these outcomes that are happening and figure out like, well, okay, how am I supposed to move forward and learn from the feedback that I'm getting because this feedback is so incredibly noisy?”

    2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “It was an interesting mix. The game was amazing for me. It's this really incredible. Exercise in constantly revealing That you know less than you thought you did five minutes ago. So as you get better and better at the game, you realize you know less and less about the game in terms of the percentage of the things that there are to know about the game.”

    2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “And when I explained that I was actually the main financial support of the family, they really kind of wouldn't believe it. And very often it would sort of devolve into, you know, have you thought about Gamblers Anonymous? So it wasn't just that it wasn't prestigious. I mean, you were really on the fringes of society and people didn't even believe that it was something that you could do for a living. And I would sort of, you know, if I felt that I really wanted to get them to understand, I would say, well, don't you think that people who are investing in the market, that they can actually make a living at it? Yes. Well, what I do is very similar. It's just a different kind of market. And then they would, again, ask me if I'd been to Gamblers Anonymous. So I might as well have been telling them like I'm a professional backer out player or something. I don't know. So, yeah, I mean, it was interesting because”

    2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “What's the opposite of prestigious? Not, I mean, it wasn't even just that it was unglamorous. I think, you know, I used to joke that the conversations that I would have with people, they would say, you know, what do you do for a living? And I would say, I'm a poker player. And then they would say, oh, you're a dealer. And I would say, no, I don't. I'm not a dealer. I actually play. And then there would be some variety of ways that the conversation would go. They would ask what my husband did because they were curious what I actually did for money in order to support this horrible, evil gambling habit that I had.”

    2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “And he found a grandmaster that he could study under in New York, had gotten into Columbia, decided to defer a year to go and study with this grandmaster before starting college. And in that year, got connected into the games world in New York. So, you know, it's chess and backgammon and poker. They're all very interconnected. So he started playing poker. And in that first year, he lost his college fund, which was about $6,300. But right at the ship pretty quickly. And by the time this was all happening with me, he had already been playing for 10 years and had actually made the final table of the main event of the World Series of Poker. So he figured out how to play the game really well and sort of guided me into it as a suggestion for how to make money and then became one of my key mentors”

    2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “It is a family business, yeah. So I think that nowadays people think, oh, I can see how someone would end up thinking they should go play poker because nowadays it's on television. And so everybody kind of knows that poker is a thing that you can do for a living because they see it on like ESPN. But for me, at that time, this was in the mid 90s. It was not on television. You were never going to come across somebody who was like, hey, I'm a professional poker player. So it would have been, it was a very strange thing for me to end up doing because it wasn't something that was out in the public sphere as a way to make a living. The only reason why I ended up getting into it was because my brother, when he was a teenager, had gotten really into chess. And I mean, into chess like big books studying, you know, openings and moves and, you know, so on.”

    2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So, because the job market and academics is seasonal, I miss that season. So I was going to have to wait until the next year. And so I went off to Montana where my husband at the time had a house. And I was going to recruit for a few months and then head back to Philadelphia to finish up at Penn and go back out on the job market. And it's during that time that I started playing poker mainly out of a need for money. And I thought, well, okay, so I'll do this in the meantime for money. In the meantime, just happened to turn into like, you know, 20 years.”

    2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Well, first of all, I'm impressed that you dug up the syntactic bootstrapping bit. I usually just say cognitive science or language learning. Yeah, so I kind of had a winding path. went to graduate school. I was studying syntactic bootstrapping, which for those people who are interested is the theory that children learn their first language because they have an innate grammar built in. And if you can access the grammar, that's what allows you to bootstrap the meanings of the words that you're hearing in the language stream. So that's what I was studying. Right at the end of it, I mean, I'm talking five years in on my way to my first job talk, actually, at NYU, I got sick and I'd been struggling with some stomach issues that year and I got really sick right as I was going out into the job market and actually landed in the hospital for two weeks.”

    2018-07-25 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT