#37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong
The Knowledge Project
2018/07/25
#37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong
#37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong
The Knowledge Project
2018/07/25
In this wide-ranging, deeply insightful conversation, Annie Duke—former world-class poker player, cognitive scientist, and author of Thinking in Bets—unpacks how we really make decisions when outcomes are uncertain, feedback is misleading, and emotions run high.
Annie Duke reveals how poker served as a rigorous training ground for decision-making under uncertainty: outcomes are noisy, luck masks skill, and 'resulting'—judging decisions solely by results—distorts learning. She explains why treating beliefs probabilistically, not absolutely, reduces defensiveness and fosters intellectual humility. Key to growth was surrounding herself with truth-seeking peers who practiced exploratory (not confirmatory) thinking—calling out biases, debating both sides, and conducting premortems. Duke emphasizes process over outcome: evaluating decisions requires reconstructing the context, mental model, and available information—not just the result. She warns against conflating confidence with certainty, advocates for saying 'I'm not sure' more often, and offers practical tools like decision journals, time-traveler perspective-taking, and structured group accountability. Ultimately, smarter decisions emerge not from eliminating uncertainty, but from building habits, cultures, and mental models that honor it—with honesty, collaboration, and humility.
09:18
09:18
Learning in real-world poker is not as simple as the view presented in Psych 1 textbooks, which emphasize feedback closely tied to decisions and actions for learning to occur.
21:23
21:23
Eric Seidel said there's nothing to learn from bad-beat stories—only strategy discussions drive improvement
29:26
29:26
Eric Seidel told the speaker that the goal should be accuracy, not just affirming priors, and would hold her accountable
32:03
32:03
Forming a group agreement provides immediate gratification for admitting mistakes and avoiding bad-beat stories
55:10
55:10
Being under scrutiny leads to decisions based on avoiding criticism rather than decision quality, which is an innovation killer
1:00:42
1:00:42
Resulting stifles innovation and harms long-term competitiveness
1:05:46
1:05:46
Leaders should memorialize the decision tree and assign probabilities to different scenarios, despite the fear of not being perfectly accurate
1:11:28
1:11:28
A premortem changes the concept of being a team-player by imagining goal failure to anticipate problems and adjust probabilities
1:13:47
1:13:47
Memorializing decisions and probabilities focuses on the decision-making process
1:22:01
1:22:01
Generic questions yield useless advice; specificity enables actionable insight
1:29:48
1:29:48
Knowing the outcome distorts analysis of the decision-making process because real decisions involve hidden information and luck
1:37:35
1:37:35
Saying 'I'm not sure' helps separate confidence from certainty
1:40:12
1:40:12
Expressing uncertainty makes one a more believable communicator
1:45:38
1:45:38
Embrace uncertainty to be a better decision-maker and more open-minded
