The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Duke: Premortems alone generally fail to change people's plans or behavior
“What you find with pre-mortems, this is actually work. I actually did this work with Marie Schweitzer and Linnea Gombe, who are both at Penn. Then when you have people do pre-mortems it generally doesn't actually change their plan very much, or it changed thei…”
Duke: Institutional investors underperform random selling by 70 basis points
“When you look at their sell side decisions, they're usually about 70 bips worse than the benchmark.
So if you were to just randomly
Free the capital up from your portfolio.
How would you do?
That's the benchmark.
When you look at their actual decisions, and th…”
Duke: Ron Conway is most proud of coaching founders to quit
“There's a whole long list of things that you might think he's super proud of, but what's interesting is the thing he's the most proud of is actually coaching founders to quit, which really goes against what we think about as Silicon Valley, like VCs who like, …”
Duke: Smart people aware of cognitive biases are worse at overcoming them
“In fact, there's a lot of evidence that says that smart people who know about them are actually worse.”
Duke: Institutional investors beat beta by 100 to 120 bps on buys
“So when you look at expert investors on the buy side,
They're doing really well.
They're generally doing somewhere around like a hundred, a 120 bips or so better than the beta.”
Duke: Kahneman admitted priming studies in Thinking, Fast and Slow failed replication
“The thing about Danny was what, when you talked about it, he was the first one to tell you, like, I wish priming wasn't in the book. Doesn't replicate.”
Duke: Kahneman's structured hiring rubrics raised hit rates from 50% to 65%
“And then, you know, what he found was after you've gone through that process, if you then sort of use your intuition after having done that, not before, that then you actually can really drastically improve sort of your hit rate on hiring. And in that case, it…”
Duke: NBA draft order predicts playing time independently of player skill
“Draft order was predictive. Independent of the skill of the player, for how much playing time the player got, and for how long their contract was.”
Duke: 2021 report estimated California bullet train cost at $120B
“The last report that came out, which was just this last year, now estimates the cost at about a hundred and twenty billion. And still says, like, it's very uncertain that we're going to actually be able to conquer these engineering challenges.”
Duke: Daniel Kahneman uses Richard Thaler as his quitting coach
“So this really came through to me, I think in a really clear way in a conversation with Danny Kahneman when he told me he has a quitting coach. His name is Richard Deller. We should all be lucky enough to have quitting coaches who are Nobel laureates. Let me g…”
Duke: 1990s poker required less skill due to wider informational edge
“So the gap between the people who like understood the game and knew the game and everybody else was so wide that as a professional, you didn't need to be nearly as good then as you would need to be now in order to win.”
Duke: About 80% of meeting time is spent discussing existing consensus
“About 80% of meetings get spent on agreements.”
Duke: People Spend 6–7 Work Weeks Yearly Choosing Food, Clothes, and Shows
“The interesting thing about what to eat in a restaurant, what to wear, what to watch on Netflix, is that I think if you add just those three things together, I think it's something like between six and seven work weeks that we spend per year on those decisions…”
Duke: US schools pushed probability math from kindergarten to eighth grade
“So when you look at the curriculum for most K through 12 in 1980, starting in kindergarten, you were learning probability. And now the first point at which probability is introduced in the math curriculum in the United States is in eighth grade.”
Duke: Most mountaineering fatalities occur during the descent
“And most of the dangers are on the descent. That's when most people die is coming back down where you're tired and you don't have as much adrenaline and obviously your oxygen is low.”
Duke: Sears once represented one percent of total US GNP
“At one point, they represented one percent of the total GNP of the United States.”
Duke: Research shows people escalate commitment when outcomes deteriorate
“There's really amazing work, some from Katie Milkman and Maurice Schweitzer, which shows this escalation of commitment, that when things are going poorly, we actually escalate our commitment.”
Duke: Harvard Study Showed Hand-Raising Artificially Created Supermajorities
“What they found with the group that was raising their hands in class was that super majorities formed very quickly. In other words, consensus formed. Once people sort of saw consensus start to form, people were sort of going with the consensus. I think partly …”
Duke: Surveyed probability interpretations for 'real possibility' ranged from 16% to 81%
“The biggest spread I ever got was on real possibility, where the range was 16% to 81%, and it wasn't like Three people in the group were like up toward 81 person was at 16. It was actually spread out across them.”
Duke: Women make up only three percent of poker room players
“In an average poker room, three percent of the people playing are women.”
Duke: Van Bavel and Pereira research shows tribes provide feelings of distinctiveness
“There's a great paper actually that just came out recently from Jay Van Bovel and Andrea Pereira out of NYU, which is talking about this. And one of the things they say is that there's a few things that tribes give you but one of them is actually it gives you …”