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Dealing with the Cards You’re Dealt: How to Project Confidence by Expressing Uncertainty, with Annie Duke, Retired Professional Poker Player and Author, Thinking in Bets
I like to think of myself as an uncertainty evangelist. Like, I’m a big, just shouting it from the rooftops, we should all be embracing uncertainty.
Say, “I’m not sure.”
I think that we’re taught that I’m not sure and I don’t know there are like strings of dirty words or something. I mean last time you put I don’t know on a test what happened to you? I’m pretty sure you got marked wrong. But the thing is that that’s really a shame because I’m not sure is a much more accurate representation of the state of our beliefs, the state of our knowledge. Certainly, it’s a much more accurate representation of any kind of prediction of the future. If I say to you well I think that we should implement this business strategy because here’s how it’s going to turn out, well I hope that you’re not saying I know for sure it’s going to turn out that way because that’s just not an accurate representation of the world too many things can intervene. There’s too much luck involved in the way that things turn out. Even if I know for sure what the mathematics are, even if I’ve got a coin, I’ve examined it, I know it’s a fair coin with a heads and a tail so I know it’s going to land heads or tails 50 percent of the time I still don’t know how it’s going to turn out on the next flip.
So if you ask me if I flip this coin what’s it going to land, there’s one sense in which I can tell you something with some certainty I can say well if I had done my homework I can say well 50 percent of the time it will lead heads. And if you say to me well no that’s not what I want you to tell me, what’s it going to land? My answer has to be I don’t know. I mean how could I? So A, uncertainty is a more accurate representation of the world and I’d like to argue that the more accurate your representation of the world the better your decisions are and the better you’re going to propel yourself to success. So that’s number one. But we’re taught that it’s a bad thing.
Say, “I’m x percent confident.”
One of the things that I used to say in poker when people would ask me about it they’d say don’t you need to be like super confident to be a great poker player? And I would say well it kind of depends on what you mean by confidence. There’s one thing, which would be I would sort of view as hubris in the face of the game is thinking that you know much more about the game than you actually do. Because the game is incredibly complicated, the more that you learn about it the more that you figure out that you don’t know very much about the game. So there’s this expansion of your knowledge of what you don’t know as you go through and how little you really know. That’s even as you’re getting better at it it’s sort of you’re unpeeling it and there’s just more and more layers underneath it.
And so I really look at the game of poker and I say gosh I really don’t know very much about this. I’m really unsure about the strategy. I really don’t know how to solve this problem. That’s different than being confident in the face of your opponents saying the kind of way that I think about this game is going to help me to best of them at it. So those are two very, very separate things and I think we conflate the two. So that what we think is that being confident is being certain. And here’s the problem: again, it’s not an accurate representation of the world, number one, number two, it causes you to be close-minded. And what we always want to be doing is calibrating and updating our beliefs because the better, the more accurate our beliefs are the better our decisions are going to be, the better our predictions about the future that results from those decisions. Because our decisions are always informed by our beliefs and our beliefs are really bets on the future, we’re going to invest some sort of resource that propels us towards some set of futures and the decision we make we think is going to propel us toward the best possible future that we could get given the resources that we have to invest so we want our beliefs to be really good.
If you walk around certain that what you believe is true and expressing certainty that what you believe is true it will close your mind off to new information because we will swat it away. Confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, all of those things are going to cause us to protect our beliefs, which are part of our identity, and we will not be open to new information.
Think about the difference between somebody who says we should go with this strategy and I’m 100 percent sure it’s going to work out versus we should go with this strategy and I’m like 60 percent that this is the best strategy. And here’s the different ways that I think it could turn out so that you understand why I think this is the best strategy. And here’s the other strategies I’ve been considering and here’s how I think that they might turn out. And they’re speaking in this probabilistic way and they’re telling you the different scenarios that they’ve imagined and the different futures that they think could occur given the different decision. Who is the more believable communicator? So when people ask me isn’t uncertainty a barrier to success I just turn it on its head and I say well don’t you think certainty is? Don’t you think that’s the barrier to success?
Ask, “What do you think?”
Here’s the thing, there’s too much-hidden information out of there. You’ve only had the experiences that you have, you only have the hypotheses that you can come up with, you only have the strategies that you can think of, the tactics you can think of, you only believe what you believe because you’re you. So how do we get more information? We go and seek out the opinions of other people. But in order to do that, A, we have to be willing to look for it, which we won’t to do if we already believe we’re certain. What’s the motivation to go look for more information if you’re certain? And we want to open the door to other people to tell us what they know, to get their opinions.
So, embracing uncertainty is going to help you be successful because it’s going to invite people to be your collaborators on making your predictions about the future better, on considering more possible scenarios in the way that those might turn out, on refining the probability of different scenarios occurring, of thinking about the downside as opposed to the upside and so on and so forth I mean all the way down the list.