Duke: Complicated problems like chess are solvable, but poker is fundamentally complex
Annie Duke · Annie Duke – Decision Making in a Crisis (Capital Allocators, EP.132) · Apr 20, 2020 · at 8:01
Decision strategist Annie Duke distinguishes between complicated and complex environments during a Capital Allocators webinar on decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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“So the way I think about the difference between complicated and complex would actually be the difference between chess and poker. So a complicated decision is one that's hard. It's got a lot of levels. It's very deep, but there is a solution. So whatever ground truth is, is totally discoverable and it's solvable. So one of the ways that you could think about that is that if I show you a position mid game in chess, you can figure out how you got there. So it's complicated. It's hard to do, but the solution is knowable. So in that particular case, what you can think about is given enough data, you could actually get to certainty. Whereas complex decisions, when you're dealing with complexity, it's a little bit different, which is the solution really kind of isn't knowable. You can, depending on how much information you have, you can certainly model it out and try to capture as much of the world as you possibly can, but you can't really get to a hundred percent.”
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