YouSaid · the spoken record

Maria Konnikova

lines on the record: 105
first: 2020-08-04
most recent: 2020-08-04
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

“And then I put it away. And do not use it when I'm coming to a decision because it's not relevant. In poker, there's this idea called tilt, which Eric introduced me to and which it's just, it became one of my favorite words in the world. I use it all the time now. Another way that poker has filtered its way into my life is that now I say that I'm tilted and things put me on tilt and that something is tilting all the time without even thinking about it because it's such a such a convenient word. What tilt means is that you've let emotion into your thought process, irrelevant emotion into your thought process. Usually it's negative. So by negative I mean the negative emotion. So for instance, you lose a really big pot, so you lose a lot of money and you get angry or you get really frustrated. And so that affects how you're playing because”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that we are all necessarily emotional if we're human. I mean, even Sherlock Holmes was someone who experienced emotions, even though people think of him as this kind of cold, almost computer-like person. What he did, and this is, it's interesting, there are actually a lot of ways that writing about Sherlock Holmes helped me become a better poker player because it's a lot of things, a lot of things overlap there. And this rational emotional thing is one of them. So what Sherlock Holmes does is he acknowledges his emotions. He recognizes that they exist and then he dismisses them if they're irrelevant to the decision. So he says, you know, sure, you know, I feel sympathy for this woman. Sure, I see that she's a really good person. But now I'm going to dismiss all of that because it's irrelevant to the decision. So I feel the emotion. I experience it.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Forced me to go deeper into that and to figure out why can't we tell the difference and how can you become more confident in your intuitions? Well, you have to go back and say, do I have a basis for this? Do I have the experience in this? Do I have, you know, is there a reason my intuition should be right? Because what correct intuition is, is all of this experience that we've accumulated in something that we don't necessarily have conscious access to, the process of acquiring. And so your intuition should only be trusted if you're an expert in this area, if there's a reason why you should be confident here. And learning to kind of disentangle that and learning to spot false confidence for what it is, I think, is a crucial skill just in absolutely anything.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These days, I'm actually much less confident in any of my opinions and in any, even my opinion of which way we should turn in order to get back to where we were trying to go, you know, something as simple as that. I've learned to really tone it down and to really question myself every single time and say, okay, wait, why am I sure? Why am I so confident in this? Is the data reliable? Is it something that I can trust or not? You know, where is that confidence coming from? Because one of the things I learned in psychology is that, you know, we have intuitions all the time and we are actually horrible, horrible, horrible at being able to tell the correct intuitions from the wrong intuitions. We're about 50-50. And that's a really bad track record. And sometimes our intuitions are spot on and sometimes they're completely wrong. But we can't tell the difference.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said I knew where to go and really thought I did and just got us further and further lost. And at some point, this was obviously before smartphones. This was before everyone had a GPS on them. All of a sudden we just, we were deep in Chinatown and had no idea where we were or how to get anywhere. And my mom had actually kind of known where we were before, but I was so confident that she just deferred to me. And I've done things like that a few times, not a few, a number of times in my life in the past, where I think I know something. And so I just confidently do it. And poker and thinking about things in this more metacognitive way where you have to think about your thinking and not just think, oh, I think I know what this is and I'm pretty confident in it. It actually, I think, made examples like that much less likely to occur.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm someone who is a fairly opinionated person. And I'm also prone to exaggeration, especially when I speak. And it's just kind of for a rhetorical effect. And I never really, I've never really thought about it. It's just something that I do. But all of a sudden, I actually started saying, okay, well, if this isn't accurate, maybe I shouldn't say it and maybe I should verify the accuracy before saying it, you know, let me start fact-checking myself a little bit. And if I'm offering an opinion, there was a really, really funny thing that happened when I was pretty, pretty young, maybe 15 years old or so. My mom and I were taking a walk and I grew up in the Boston suburbs and we were in the city visiting and walking around and we got a little bit lost. And I'm just so confident.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started critiquing myself a lot more and I started being my own fact checker a lot more than I had been used to doing in the past. So, you know, I'm someone who's really a fact-finding factor.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rewreading Kant and thinking through all of this, it just made me realize how relevant he is to the modern world and to social media and to the internet when suddenly everyone's an expert on everything and everyone is so certain about everything and you have all of these amplified opinions online and I just wish all of them would just do that thought exercise and be forced to you know actually forced to go through with it that we had some mechanism by saying okay before you tweet something out you know how much money are you willing to bet on the fact that what you're saying is actually correct i think that could lead to some pretty interesting results”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To start upping the values. Would I say this and stand by it for $10? Yeah, sure. What about for a hundred? Okay, yeah, that seems reasonable. $1,000. Okay, well, maybe I need to look through some of my assumptions. Give me a second. A million? Okay, okay, right. I'm not that sure anymore. I really need to figure it out. Or, you know, a million, yes, I will bet even a million. I'll bet everything because that is how certain I am that I'm right. It really forces you to take a step back and reflect because all of a sudden you have something very, very tangible on the line. And Kant uses this as an experiment for how to make people reason better, how to make people better thinkers, how to make people actually stop to consider what they're saying rather than just spewing stuff and being experts. And, you know, when I was reading this and working on”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, he did. He did. And I was so excited when I found that section of Critique of Pure Reason and was able to apply it to poker. Kant says that betting actually forms an integral part to improving your decision process and improving your level of certainty in something because people can say all sorts of stuff and just make all sorts of pronouncements if they're not held accountable for it. However, if you're forced to put a monetary value on your opinion on how certain you are of something you're saying, on how certain you are about if you're a doctor, how certain you are about your diagnosis, if you have to bet on it, all of a sudden it forces you to stop for a second and think, okay, am I really this sure? How much do I value it? And Kantine proposes a thought experiment.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in poker, I play by myself. No one else is playing my cards for me. But I do think that forming those relationships, having someone to talk to, being able to verbalize your thought process, I just think it's so crucial in becoming a good thinker, no matter what you're doing.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that one of the really interesting things people talk about the Sherlock Watson relationship as Watson being the spoil for homes. And that's true. But Watson also plays an incredibly important role in forcing homes to think better, to be actually a better detective, to be better at his job, to have a clearer thought process because he asks questions and Holmes needs to respond to him and needs to bring him through his thought process and tell him how he arrived at a certain conclusion. And doing that helps Holmes see flaws in his logic that he didn't see before. And I think he actually becomes a much better detective through their friendship and through kind of that evolution that happens only because he had to talk things through with Watson. So I mean, I'm someone who works by myself. I'm a writer.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Appreciate what was going on. So sure, you can get some of those tools elsewhere, but I do think it's very important to have someone else. And I actually think this is true of everything, not just poker. I mean, the way that I became a better psychologist is because I had great mentors who were able to talk me through my thought process along the way. The way I improved as a writer was obviously doing it myself. And you have to, with all of these things, nothing will supplement or nothing will completely override the need to just do it and do it and do it and practice and kind of get better that way. But I also had amazing writing mentors. I had people who really helped me learn how to think through pieces, how do I think through writing, how do I think through all of this. People who taught me to take apart other people's books so that I could figure out how they did what they were doing and how, you know, how I could apply that.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I do think you need someone to tell you if you're a complete novice. I mean, I would have had no way of knowing what I should be paying attention to, what I should be thinking through, what I should be doing if I didn't have Eric to direct me. I mean, I could have gotten some level of that from online tutorials, online videos, but it just would not have been the same. The fact that it was personalized, the fact that it was directed at me, at how I was playing, at how I was thinking, and that it was kind of this direct feedback, I think that was crucial in enabling me to improve as rapidly as I did and to actually”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just helping me become a more thoughtful player and through being more thoughtful, a better player, not necessarily a player who was winning right away because I didn't know enough. I didn't have enough experience. All of those input variables weren't there. But the player who was building kind of creating the building blocks that would enable me to be a successful player down the line.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As long as you're thinking through things correctly, then you did well, even if you ended up coming to the wrong conclusion because that means that eventually with better inputs you'll come to the right conclusion. And even if you came to the right conclusion, but then the cards went against you and you were, you had a bad outcome. In both of those cases, as long as your thought process is solid, then you've won basically, then that's all you need. And so forcing me to actually think through, what am I going to tell Eric? Force me to start thinking and to start thinking better and to start reflecting on elements of my thought process that I didn't even realize were there because I would just kind of do things. And it really, let me tell you, it transferred out of poker very quickly and I found myself doing this in all sorts of situations. But at the time, it was...”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly. And just you can't underestimate how important that is. One of the things that I suddenly realized after we did this a few times was that I started thinking better because I just started thinking in advance, what am I going to tell Eric? And that made me actually stop and reflect for that extra second. Whereas before I would have just acted because, well, you know, let's do this and it seems right. Now I'd say, okay, if I say that to Eric, he's going to say, well, that's not good enough. That's not a decision process. That means that this is a mistake. Even if you did the right thing, it's still a mistake. So one of the things that he really taught me is that you have to distinguish the action and the outcome from the thought process. As long as your thought process is solid,”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My games, and he could explain what things I was doing wrong, what things I was doing right, what I could change about my thinking. Because the way that he approached it is he never said, this is a mistake. He would say, what are you thinking here? Why did you do this? And that's how he taught me. It was not a prescriptive, this is what you do here. It was, why did you do this? What motivated you? What were you thinking?”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was going to be playing live poker, that's what I wanted to do. Online is an easy way to learn because of the sheer volume of hands. You have a computer dealing hands, so it's just, it's really quick. So whereas in live poker, you know, in an hour, you might play, I don't know, 30 hands, maybe even fewer, depending on the table you're sitting at, you know, one slow player and suddenly you're playing 10 hands an hour. online it's hundreds and so you just get a lot of experience quickly because you see all these situations unfolding before you i did not enjoy playing online it did not make me want to become an online player but it did allow me to get more experience quickly and it also allowed me a really important tool that eric and i could use because i could record myself playing so we actually were able to go through”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With that. So I think what a great coach does is know who specializes in the different elements that you need and is able to make those connections. And I think it really helped that Eric has so much humility that he's so humble about everything. I mean, honestly, he could have taught me most of this himself, but he thinks that there's always someone who knows better than he does. And he just his own lack of ego. I keep having to tell him, you know, I want your opinion. I want to know what you think. Because he keeps saying, well, you know, I'm not quite sure. But here are the people who really know a lot. So that's a lot of what he did. And the lessons that he and I had, so the way that it eventually evolved once I kind of read enough to understand at least basic strategy is that I started playing and I started playing online first.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that Eric did for me, and one of the reasons I was so incredibly lucky that he was my coach, is he actually did this throughout. He kept doing it, you know, up until a year ago when we were actively working together to kind of get me to play poker well. He would just, he knows everyone and he knows who's good at specific things and he would just send me to them. So he sent me to Dan Harrington and Dan Harrington is the one who wrote the books that I was reading to pieces. And he talked me through some of that early stuff. A year later, when I was getting much more advanced and needed help with kind of the more mathematical stuff and using solvers, he sent me to Jason Kuhn, who's one of the kind of most well-respected tournament players who is really, really mathematical, and he just knows solvers like the back of his hand. Like that's what he does. And so Jason helped.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And actually, Eric, because Eric knows everyone, he said that, you know, maybe we can introduce you to someone who can go through some of the basics with you because my expertise is more in kind of the higher level strategy stuff. Dan Harrington is going to be in.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm so glad that we come from a similar place. But yeah, three betting it ends up is just a fancy way to say if someone raises you raise over that, you raise a second time. So it's just a way of explaining that someone has already raised and you decided you wanted to raise even more. We didn't have lessons like that. Instead, it was really guided by what I was reading, where my questions were, and kind of what the issues were that I wasn't getting.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every question I had, including ones that I thought okay, you know, this might be stupid, but I'm just going to ask because I don't understand it. And Eric and I would have conversations. So it wasn't kind of a formal lesson like today we're going to be talking about three bedding ranges. I mean, at that point, I didn't even know what three bedding meant. And we didn't have most tutors would have lessons like that.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Learn anything, any new skill these days because everything is online or not everything but a lot of things are online. So I was able to get kind of the basics of the game, you know, how do I play, you know, how does it work? What are the different elements? So I was able to get that from online videos. You know, Eric's not someone who sits me down and says, okay, you're going to be dealt two cards. Those are called your whole cards. We never had lessons like that. That was kind of on me. He said, okay, ramp up a little bit and then we'll talk. And so the way that I read Harrington was incredibly active reading. So I would read and reread every chapter multiple times. I'd underline, I'd write all over the margins. I mean, my copies of the book, I'm just looking at them on my bookshelf right now and they are so tattered. It's not even funny. I just read those books to pieces. And I would write down.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You didn't have one because he has never really taught anyone. He didn't even know how to begin. And he just said, well, you know, I'm really good friends with this guy, Dan Harrington. And he wrote books that I think are very good. So maybe you want to read those. And he, I'm not sure. Maybe they're going to be too advanced for you. But, you know, maybe start there. And so he kind of gave me a little reading list starting with Dan Harrington's books and said, okay, you know, whenever you have a question, jot it down and we'll talk about it and we'll just take it from there and kind of see what happens. So I read Harrington on Holdem, the first two volumes, which are the two relevant volumes. And it took me a long time. I mean, they were hard. And every time I realized, okay, I don't even have this basic knowledge. I'd go online. It's a great time to.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Highest levels. But I think it's something that he really wanted to prove to himself and to everyone else. And so he didn't actually agree to be like, oh, you know, I'm going to be your coach for the next year. He said this sounds interesting. Let's try it out. Let's see if it works. And this is when he also told me, you know, I've never coached anyone. I don't know how. I don't think I'm going to be a good coach, but we can see if our minds kind of think in similar ways. And he said everything that you're saying about decision making makes a lot of sense to me. And I think it's going to be very useful in poker. So I think there's a chance it's going to work. So let's try it out. So we tried it out and it worked and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a game that can offer so much to so many people. And he wants it to be Popularized correctly, he wants the misconceptions that abound about poker to go away. He wants someone to actually write about the beauty of the game as it is and why it's such an important game. He wanted someone who could say poker is not gambling and explain exactly why poker wasn't gambling. And so I think he was intrigued that this was going to be a very different project, not from the poker world that I was coming from the outside, and that he'd have a chance to really kind of prove his philosophy, which I think is also important. I mean, it's really hard to be considered one of the greatest players of all time and to be following such a different approach from all of the young, great players and to have people say, oh, well, maybe your time has passed. And people have said that about Eric over and over and over. And then he goes and he beats them again and he wins in other title. And they say, oh, whoops, I guess he's still competitive at that.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, Yes, I thought it might be this might be a good fit. So he was really intrigued and he's actually somebody who has incredibly wide-ranging interests. He knew exactly who Walter Michelle was. He knew all about the marshmallow studies. He was excited that I came from this world because it's a world that he reads about, that he's interested in. I mean, he loves the New Yorker. He reads the New Yorker every single week. He listens to the New Yorker radio. He probably knows more about the New Yorker than I do. So it was fortuitous because I actually didn't know about those elements of his personality. And I think for him, it was also intriguing that I was going to be writing for a popular audience. And he just, if you get to know Eric, you will realize that he loves poker. I mean, he is passionate about it. He thinks it's just the greatest game in the world.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was, yes. Walter Michelle, I was his final graduate student. And he was an incredible, incredible man. And he took me on knowing that I wanted to be a full-time writer and that I had no interest in academia. I still remember this. He told me, you know what? Good for you. If I were deciding right now, I wouldn't want to go into academia either. It's a terrible place. And so he was wonderful. But we studied what I did my graduate work on was self-control and hot and cool decision making specifically in conditions of uncertainty and specifically we looked at risk and risk taking and actually had people play stock market games. I actually told Eric a little bit about the work and the studies and he's like, wow, this is so perfect for poker.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally clean slate from a totally different background and I wanted to start from scratch at a late point in my life speaking as a poker player most poker players start in their team”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, and I actually at that point I did not know that he'd never taken on a student, so I learned that after. That might have discouraged me a little bit. But, you know, sometimes what you don't know can save you, right? It makes you a little bit, it gives you that extra confidence boost that would have gone away had you known the full picture. So when I met him, I explained everything and I said, look, you know, I don't know anything about poker. This is where the 52 versus 54 cards came up, but I'm a psychologist. I'm a writer. You know, this is why I want you to coach me. And I kind of gave him the same pitch that I gave you in terms of his longevity in terms of the psychological approach. It's like, and I want to know if I can, you know, I can make this work. And to him, what was interesting about it was that I wasn't like a poker player coming to him asking for lessons. I was someone with just a”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was very nervous. I was like, this is going to be such an important sales pitch for me. And he had no idea what it was going to be about. It was a little bit of an ambush because obviously I told him I'm working on a project that I think you might be interested in. But I didn't say, hey, I'm about to ask you to basically let me shadow you for the next year or so. And I want you to teach me to play this game that you're so good at.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So all of those things came together, and I was like, Eric Seidel is my first choice. I won't say who my second choice was just because I never had to go there and I'm so glad I didn't. But he was my first choice. So I actually reached out to him on Twitter of all places. I didn't have an email, but I'm a journalist and I'm very persistent when I need to contact someone. And he actually responded. And the way I reached out is I said, hey, you know, I'm a writer for The New Yorker. I'm working on a new project and I'd like to talk to you about it. I think it might be something that you're interested in. And here we're back and I actually had no idea that he also lived in New York. I thought he just lived in Vegas. And he said, I'm actually in New York if you wanted to meet in person. I was like, oh my God, he wants to meet in person. This is incredible. So I said, yes, of course, let's do it. And so we arranged a meeting. We arranged to have breakfast.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a way. And like I said, of course, he also does the math, and the math people don't totally dismiss all of the psychology. But there is a difference in emphasis. And obviously my background is psychology. I have a PhD in psychology. That's kind of where I come from. I studied self-control. I studied emotional regulation. I studied risky decision making from a psychological perspective. So because I wanted to learn something new and ramp up quickly, I figured it was going to be best to play to my strengths. And math is not my strength. You know, the last time I took a math course was in high school. I felt like I couldn't choose someone to coach me who was going to be very heavily mathematical because it was just too different from my background and too different from the things that could make me a stronger player that could distinguish me as a player. So that's the first part.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And mathematical game theory optimal GTO and how do I play game theoretically so that I can't be taken advantage of these numbers. Let me run these solvers. Let me do all these simulations and have the exact strategy that would be the best approximation in every single situation and on and on and on. And then there's a more psychological approach, kind of the all right, you know, yes, there's math, yes, there are pot odds, yes, there's all this basic stuff that you need to know, but ultimately, especially if you're playing live poker, which is what I was going to be doing, then you need to know people and you need to understand dynamics and you need to understand emotions and you need to approach it from that perspective and that's what's going to give you your biggest edge in live games. And Eric came from that school. That's kind of considered the old.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“him and he didn't he always was kind of shying away from the limelight and I really liked that as well because that to me spoke of someone who was just a more private person and someone who was probably a good human being on some level and you know I could have been completely wrong by the way he could have ended up being a complete jerk I wasn't wrong luckily but that's that's how he struck me and the other thing that I was looking for There are kind of two approaches to poker and I don't want to set it up as like a diametrically opposed battle because the best players use elements of both. But that said there are two approaches for kind of your general way of thinking about the game and what you think is just the most important thing and what you stress. The dominant one right now is very heavily quantitated.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was actually the only player I could find who's still making final tables and winning events to this day. I mean, the guy seemed unstoppable when you looked at those statistics and there was no one comparable in terms of longevity. So right away, I kind of flagged that and I said, oh, okay, this seems interesting. But there were other players who I'd flagged for different reasons as well. And then I started watching videos. Honestly, like, he just seemed like a really nice guy. He was always quiet when he was playing. He wasn't an asshole. A lot of poker players have these very brash personalities that really come out. And maybe they're not actually like that in real life, but they really ham it up for the cameras. And I didn't want someone like that because this was going to be someone with whom I'd be spending a lot of time. And Eric just kind of, he had this very quiet, studied aura around.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a few different elements here, including luck. So first one, I decided that I was going to undertake this project. I thought, you know, I need a mentor, I need a coach. And I know how important mentorship is. I know how important those relationships are. So I thought, okay, I need someone. How in the world am I going to find someone given that I don't know anything about poker? And I don't really know this world. So I started watching there's a lot of poker content online. So my first kind of stop was to look at rankings of players and to be like, okay, these are the people who are considered great. And a lot of different names came up, you know, Eric was one of them, but you also have people like Phil Ivey and Daniel Negranu and Phil Helmuth and Duell Brunson and just on and on and on. People have arguments for why different players are the best. And Eric actually, even in those statistics, stood out to me because he started playing in the 80s. And if you look at how he's done,”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And ask the questions, you know, okay, am I making the right decisions? Is my decision process solid regardless of the outcome? And I think that's why poker is such a valuable tool, not because it's an exact analogy for life. I mean, I think it's ludicrous to think that any game can be an exact analogy for life.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stalk this global event, you know, this macroeconomic thing, this microeconomic thing on and on and on. You can always deflect the blame to someone else or to something else and not question your own decision process and say, well, I'm a brilliant investor. The reason this went wrong is because of all these other things. In poker, you just have such a clear goal and such a clear evidence when you're doing poorly. And sure you can lose money in the short term so variants, you know, in the short term, the worst player can win. But in the long term, the more skilled player is going to win. And so you actually don't, you can't blame poor decisions on, oh, well, you know, China announced this new policy that I couldn't have possibly foreseen. And so you have to go back through your own decision process.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is you're not alive anymore. You get sick, all of these horrible things can happen. So, of course, it's not a perfect model, but I think that its beauty why von Neumann decided to use it kind of as a basis to think about complicated strategic decision making is that the lack of outside noise makes you able to question your decision process in a way that you can't in real life. If we even just take kind of an analogy that's often used, which is investing, people say that poker can really help you in the stock market. And I think that that's true. And the reason it can help you become a better investor and make better decisions is the stock market is so damn noisy that when you make bad decisions, there's always something you can blame it on. You can always say, well, you know, this component of this company, this.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And I actually, that's the title of the last chapter of my book as the Luddic Fallacy. And I actually address Taleb head on. And the takeaway is that, yeah, he's absolutely right. And poker's not going to be a perfect model for life because it's a game and it's cleaner and life is much messier. But because of that, it's a perfect decision tool and teaching tool because it teaches you to deal with uncertainty in an environment that's controlled where you're not going to die. The uncertainty in real life is much messier. The worst thing that can happen at the poker table is use a lot of money. And that's it. And then you either get more money and play again or you don't. And in real life, the worst thing that can happen.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tried this myself, and that was kind of the germ of the idea that brought me into the world of poker when I decided this is what my next book is going to be.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thick of it, and who thinks basically poker is going to prevent nuclear holocaust that it's going to bring world peace if he can figure out a way to solve this game. And he didn't. He didn't solve it. Poker actually no limit Hold him is still unsolved, but he created game theory. And when I read all of this, I was like, oh, wow, this is fascinating. What is this poker thing I should really take a look at it? And so I started reading about poker and something just collect. I said, oh my God, you know. This guy von Neumann wasn't an idiot. He was on to something. Maybe I should learn the game and use that as a way to explore these themes of chance and skill because poker does have elements that you can control. You control how you play. You control your strategy. And then ultimately there's an element of chance as well because you don't control the cards. You don't know what card is coming next. And if Mon Neumann thinks it's a great proxy for life, well, hell, you know, why don't I?”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just gambling, but he loved poker because he, the way he described it, was that poker was the perfect game of incomplete information. There's information that I have, there's information that you have, there's information we have in common, and we have to play each other. It's not just about the cards. It's about what he called these little tactics of deception, of trying to figure out what does this man think I mean to do. And this is what games are about in my theory. So that's a quote that really just struck me from the book. And he decided that if he could actually solve poker, he'd have a rubric for solving the most complex strategic decisions in the world. And at this time, you know, he was advising the US government. He was working on the hydrogen bomb. So this is a guy who is really in the”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, you know, that's interesting. So I picked up a theory of gains, which is the foundational text of game theory. It was not a riveting book, I have to say. However, I learned that game theory came from poker, that John von Neumann was a huge poker player, that like me, he actually didn't like games. He played all of them, but he thought that games like chess were actually in the end pretty boring because there was always a right answer and he was also one of the fathers of the computer. So he had a mind that was just constantly calculating. He's like, oh, well, I can figure out a way to solve chess. So that's not quite interesting. And he hated gambling in the sense of games of chance because once again, you just can't do anything. It's kind of the opposite of chess. There's nothing to solve. You know, it's just.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the role that Love plays in life. But that's not a book. I mean, that's like a philosophical inquiry that that's not really going to go anywhere. So I needed a book. I needed kind of a subject. I needed a plot. I needed something. And so I just immersed myself in reading about chance because that's what I actually, that's my process for anything that I write, whether it's a book or a magazine piece or a short article before I write a single word. I read and read and read and read. So I started reading about chance and someone, when they heard that I was doing, you know, this deep dive into chance said, you know, check out John von Neumann if you haven't. He invented game theory. You're going to”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take for granted, and you don't really question it when everything's going well. You think, you know, I've earned this, I deserve this, I've really worked hard, all of these, all of these phrases that we just throw around. And we don't realize just how lucky we are that, hey, I'm healthy. Hey, you know, I have a job. I'm able to do this. I'm able to do that. And they're just factors completely outside our control. And chance is variance. It doesn't care if you're a good person. It doesn't care how hard you've worked. It doesn't care about anything. I mean, it's just random stuff that happens. So when all of this started happening, and I started kind of reflecting on chance, I said, you know what? This is when I want my next book to be about. The confidence game had just come out. And I was ready to think about my next project. And I said, you know, I want to write about luck. I want to write about.”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was just kind of going on with her day, and that happened. My mom lost her job. My husband lost his job, just all of these things were going on. And it made me really pause and say, wow, you know, you think that you can be successful if you work hard, if you just kind of take control of things, if you just really put your all into it, you know, I earned where I am. I went to Harvard. I worked hard to get to Harvard. I did this. I did that. And something like this starts happening and you say, oh my God, you know, I just got so damn lucky. Of course I worked hard, but I've also, you know, I've had good health. I've had all of these things go right. And then you suddenly realize just how big a role chance plays in our day-to-day lives, in our success, in things that we just”
2020-08-04 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT