Annie Duke's calculations, the woman who in 2004 became the world poker champion, freeze the interview. On the other side of the screen, she is silent. Duke tries to find the answer. "What has been the best decision you have made with the worst results?", was the question. Watching Annie Duke think is like watching a dragon breathe. That year, more than two decades ago, winning the World Series of Poker made her the woman who had won the most prize money in the history of the game after taking two million dollars from the pot. "Sometimes something may seem to have had a good result, even if I didn't like it. I made a very good decision in 2002: to stay in poker. It was when tournaments started to be televised. I saw it as an opportunity to raise my profile. But I had another opportunity to work in the financial world. It seemed like a good idea, and I ended up winning the championship. Personally, it wasn't such a good decision. I would probably have been happier if I had retired earlier," she confesses to this newspaper.
In Decide and Bet, the essay now published by the Península editorial, Duke breaks down everything that has just gone through her mind: the architecture of the decision-making process. She bases her knowledge on the experience gained in her career as a professional poker player, where every decision is imbued with the uncertainty of putting mountains of money at stake. But also on her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. The combination has created a celebrity in American public life. She gives lectures, writes columns in the Washington Post, and works for an investment fund as a decision specialist. She even participated in 2009 in The Celebrity Apprentice, a reality show hosted by Donald Trump on NBC.
Over the years, she has identified resultism as the villain. That is, the bias of considering a decision good solely based on a positive outcome. Or deeming a decision bad, after a complex analysis process, just because the result was not as expected. "The first thing we need to know is that it is impossible to abolish resultism", she acknowledges. "The only thing we can do is to reduce the impact of that software installed in the brain on our lives. But we cannot eliminate it. There are things we can do to improve. Like tracking. Gathering information about the point at which you make the decision".
Easing the effects of short-term thinking forms the backbone of her work. Annie Duke talks about observing ourselves from the other side of the fence. We must collect valuable information at every step, improve at every moment, leave almost nothing to chance. Sketch out the scheme of each struggle against an important decision. In short: be perfect on the path to perfection. "When you practice resultism, instead of focusing on the quality of the decision, you are avoiding learning. You have to ask yourself the following question: could we have known that certain things were going to happen in advance? No. What you cannot do is make a perfect decision, have a bad result, and not repeat the process that led you to make a perfect decision. For example: having an accident after crossing a green light should not make you stop at the next green light."
Following her explanations, it is easy to grasp an idea of the effects of resultism in everyday life. The effects of this pragmatism are polluting politics. "Yes, indeed, I would love for all politicians to read my book. We would all be much better off," she laughs, but she is serious.
For now, Decide and Bet is a bible among Wall Street brokers, the honorary title given by the Anglo-Saxon world to texts that expose profitable skills. "Humans are not good at either probabilistic thinking or long-term thinking. The system, at least in the United States, is designed for short-term thinking. Politics focuses a lot on short-term results because democratic cycles tend to be quite short. Without extended mandates, politicians play to please and indulge in short-term thinking. It's negative. I completely agree that short-term thinking entrenched in politics affects citizens".
Annie Duke (right) facing Trump, during the recording of the show 'The Apprentice'.Bill Tompkins
And politics takes advantage of echo chambers. Echo chambers are the caves where today's tribes constantly agree with each other. "I propose saving the message," observes Annie Duke in the sick context of polarization. "It is likely that someone who thinks differently from us can give us good advice. Someone who thinks differently can help us make a good decision".
Two sentences from the decision-making manual, separated by a few pages, carve out the idea: "Do not discredit or ignore an idea simply because you do not like the person or the place it comes from. This kind of open-mindedness is the only way to acquire knowledge".
Back to the interview, Annie Duke, who for a time gave advice to entrepreneurs on YouTube with the program The Annie Duke Show, insists on tribes. "The thing is, humans are quite tribal. We have a very large brain. We are not fast or too strong. The social brain allows us to form groups of 300 people that facilitated survival against stronger and faster predators. Tribal identification has to do with truth. When someone within the tribe says something, we tend to believe it automatically. The tribe only confirms things we already believed beforehand. And people from the outside can offer perspective because they are exposed to different information channels. The truth needs to be questioned, but no one does it".
"Short-term thinking entrenched in politics affects citizens. I would love for all politicians to read my book. We would all be much better off"
The problem is that ideology, dispensed by agitators on social media, is the new tribe. "Since we don't live in tribes, one of the strongest forms of tribal identification is politics. It turns out that political parties cannot talk to each other". The poison contaminates any decision. It also infects the media, and the media repeats the process to the readers. "The media environment is worsening. We have access to different media and information that divide us. We don't even have shared facts anymore, objective truths established by scientific methodology. We are separated by interpretations of facts because we don't even share them. The earth is round, more or less round; it's a kind of ball, but it's not flat. We are very bad at testing facts. If the conclusion someone draws fits our preconceived conception, driven by our tribe, it is valid. And that is part of the political problem".
Annie Duke proposes another step: knowing our limitations. Those who reach this position have a considerable advantage. They are the ruling class compared to those who prefer to go with the flow. "Very few people do it," comments the champion. "Who wants, for example, to take advantage of their limitations because they know them? Are you going to analyze a piece of your narrative to break it down? You have a great gain. You feel great about yourself. We all want to develop a positive narrative. Winning in the short term shouldn't make you feel good. You just know you have won. This happened to me while playing poker. Not being aware of having made a mistake despite winning generated terrible thoughts in me. So I decided to look for them. You have to put in extra work to make yourself feel good. First, you have to recognize where your limits are. And very few people take that step," she observes.
Duke understood at a specific moment in his career that he was bad at self-analysis: he couldn't find the causes of his defeats. "That was the first limitation I recognized. Just knowing the mistakes doesn't fix them. It's important to know where your limits as a person are so you can address them." Breaking down the errors from the hands he won gave his game a new boost. And then another balcony to the brain appears: temporal discounting. Thinking about the future self: "We can recruit other versions of ourselves to act as decision companions," he writes.
"During sessions with my mentors, I was able to recognize that when I was losing, I tended to blame luck," he speaks. "I spent a lot of time at the beginning of my career trying to separate the outcome from the quality of the decision. I chose winning hands, tried to decipher the decisions along the way, whether I should have folded or not, bet more or less. And it allowed me to focus on feeling good during the error-seeking process. Being honest was tremendously helpful. I found a way to feel special. The mistakes I'm going to make, I'm going to turn them into advantages. You feel better."
The somersault of honesty was not just theory. Annie Duke reached the nirvana of the decision maker. She could talk to herself through the decisions she had refrained from making. This crystallized into a dam of losses that she applied in poker. "If I lost $300, I stopped. I removed a decision from my future self so that the next version of me wouldn't make bad decisions. Just before things got worse, I could make a good decision: if I lose $300, I stop."
At this point, intuition is exterminated. In the ideal proposed by Annie Duke, this CAT scan of our animal biases, magical thinking is proscribed. Or have you never thought about the benefits of going with the flow? Where does intuition fit in? "It's a great question. Here's the problem," she acknowledges. "Intuition is impressive. There are decisions that don't have much depth where you can let it act. Like choosing food at a restaurant. But in big decisions, you have to double-check your intuition. You must be skeptical. And articulate it to someone else. This way, you question your intuition. It's very useful to have other people look at the situation you're in and give you advice. Although I don't want you spending an hour choosing the right dress for an event. There you can go with the flow," adds the woman who knows you better than you know yourself.