The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 103 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Duke: Managers should fire a salesperson who closes 100 percent of sales
“And then all of a sudden you have a salesperson who's closing a hundred percent of their sales. And by the way, if you can't change that, you should fire them.”
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: Tackle critical bottlenecks before easy tasks to avoid false progress
“When you're approaching a problem, you want to think about what are the bottlenecks? What's the really hard thing that needs to happen in order for me to be able to unlock this problem? And that's the thing that you're supposed to go after first. You're not su…”
Duke: Asking 'would you buy it today' does not improve decision-making
“One of the things that doesn't help, and I think this is very, very important for financial professionals to hear, is one of the things that does not help is saying, just treat the decision like it's fresh.”
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: Sticking to things does not guarantee success due to survivorship bias
“I might argue that people are successful at things they stuck to, which is actually very different than if you stick to something, you'll be successful.”
Duke: The idea that angel investors excel at Series C is absurd
“Like the idea that an angel investor would be great at series C is pretty absurd, except that what we see in the moment is that people feel like they are, because it's very easy to convince yourself when you see something in front of you that's really attracti…”
Duke: The Goal of Group Meetings Should Be Informing, Not Consensus
“The goal of a really good group meeting is not to agree. And we think that the goal is agreement. We think that everybody has to walk out of that room on the same page. The goal of a great group meeting, rather, should be to inform, which is very different. So…”
Duke: Successful Leaders Resist Process Improvement Because It Devalues Past Wins
“Particularly when people are very successful, it's particularly uncomfortable for them to imagine that there might be a ways that they could really improve their decision process. And I think that the reason is that then there's all of a sudden you open up a c…”
Duke: Highly intelligent people are better at spinning data to fit beliefs
“They're better at spinning the data to fit their beliefs because they're better with data. Like, who do you put in a spin room? The dumb guy or the smart guy? No, you put the smart guy so that he can data mine for you.”
Duke: High intelligence worsens outcome bias by disguising it as process
“Unless you're willing to examine both sides of the world, how can you actually be process-oriented, right? Then you're really just outcome-oriented with a bunch of process language wrapping around it, which is why I go back to this problem of being smart makes…”
Duke: An opponent's disrespect is a competitive strategic advantage
“I think that everybody has a need to be liked and respected, but there's a time and a place for that, and when you're sitting across the table from an opponent, it is not in any way, shape, or form to your advantage to be, prove that you should be liked and re…”
Duke: High intelligence correlates with manipulating data to support prior beliefs
“It's actually correlated with how smart you are, and it's correlated in the bad way. So the smarter you are, the better you are at kind of slicing and dicing this data to support whatever your prior is.”
Duke: Grit and quitting are the exact same decision, not virtues or vices
“We think of grit as a virtue and quit as a vice, but that's not true. They're the exact same decision. By definition, if you choose to stick to something, you're choosing not to quit it. And if you choose to quit something, You're choosing not to stick with it…”
Duke: Culture glorifies disastrous persistence over rational quitting
“We don't see people who quit. That's sort of the best case scenario, or we see them as quitters, which is an insult. And the heroes of the story are people who had the exact same information, As these three climbers, and yet continued on even so to great disas…”
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: Investors fail at selling because off-book positions lack feedback
“On the buy side, you're getting constant feedback, because the position's on your book, so you can see it tick up and down every single day.
You have some thesis about what the fundamentals are going to look like, and every day you can compare your thesis to h…”
Duke: Waste is a forward-looking problem, not backward-looking
“Except waste should not be a backward looking problem. It should be a forward looking one.”
Duke: Group Decisions Are Not Better but Unjustifiably Boost Confidence
“What generally happens is that the decisions that come out of a group process are not really necessarily better. It's just that you have much more confidence in them because you have this perception that group decision making is higher quality. And that's actu…”
Duke: Complicated problems like chess are solvable, but poker is fundamentally complex
“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 groun…”
Duke: Decision makers mistakenly treat complex, uncertain problems as merely complicated
“And one of the things that I think that we have problems with as decision makers is that we think things are complicated when they're actually complex. We treat things as solvable and knowable when they're actually not, and we aren't very accepting of the idea…”
Duke: Hedges are cheapest when uncertainty is at its highest
“There's just this true thing about hedges, which is the earlier you get to them, which necessarily means when you're the most uncertain, That's when they are the cheapest to put on.”
Duke: Retail investors trying to beat full-time market professionals is pure folly
“Over time, the market's going to be efficient, and for you to think that you could pick out the very little places where it's inefficient against the people who are literally spending their lives doing it is a folly that other people get trapped in.”
Duke: Frequent feedback does not ensure effective learning in noisy domains
“And despite the fact that when I was in graduate school, I was taught that learning occurs when there's lots of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions, I realized, well, poker really tells you that's not true, because people don't play poker ve…”
Duke: Decision groups improve judgment by policing mutual biases
“So if we make a pact between the two of us, That you're going to watch my bias, and I'm going to watch your bias, and now we can form kind of a decision group together where we make rules about what the interaction is supposed to be. You can set me straight. I…”
Duke: Confirmatory decision groups perform worse than solo individuals
“Generally, dissent is not well represented, and so in some ways, a group can actually be worse than an individual if the thought style is confirmatory.”
Duke: Results-oriented cultures incentivize consensus and status-quo decisions
“So I think that when you say results-oriented, you think that you're motivating people to give you good results, and the fact is that you are, but not the right kind. What you're motivating them to do is to choose consensus choices, to stick with the status qu…”
Duke: Citing gut instinct for business decisions is a cop-out
“And so when someone says, well, I did it because of my gut, I think it's a cop-out.”
Duke: Vet investment decisions without revealing personal conclusions or the outcome
“When you're trying to vet a decision, don't say what your belief about what the correct answer is. Just leave it out. In the financial world, really deconstruct the trade before you get the result of it.”
Duke: Strict loss limits are irrational but prevent catastrophic emotional decision-making
“I sort of think about it as stacking irrationalities. Ok, so I know it's irrational to have a loss limit. But that irrationality is a lot less damaging to me in the long run than allowing myself to make these irrational decisions about whether it's a luck or s…”
Duke: People excessively leaning back to project relaxation should not be believed
“But if someone's too leaned back, if they're taking up too much space, generally you shouldn't believe a thing they're saying. Because people generally aren't like this. It's sort of like purposely trying to look relaxed.”
Duke: Most skill in poker stems from the option to quit
“In fact, I would argue that most of the skill would go out of poker if you didn't have the option to quit and couldn't get good at exercising.
That option.”
Duke: Quitting at the objectively right time usually feels way too early
“Usually if you quit at the moment that it's objectively correct, It will feel like you're quitting way, way, way too early, and that's the thing that we need to watch out for, because as human beings, we just generally stick to things too long”
Duke: You should quit when expected value goes negative
“So if we think about when you should actually quit, it's when your expected value goes negative.”
Duke: Negative news causes people to double down rather than quit
“Escalation of commitment, simply put, is like this, we have the intuition that when we get bad news, that we'll stop doing what we're doing. And actually, we don't stop. When we get bad news, we actually double down. We escalate our commitment to the cause.”
Duke: Pass-fail goal framing creates myopia that prevents quitting
“That goals are graded as pass fail. They cause this myopia. Progress along the way doesn't matter. And so that also will stop us from quitting because it gives us a target where if we don't get to the finish line, we failed.”
Duke: The hardest thing to quit is who you are
“Because the hardest thing to quit is who you are, even for Sears.”
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: Kill criteria allow managers to reward walking away from bad deals
“When we develop this set of kill criteria, not only are you more likely to follow it because you're sort of looking for those signals, and we've made some public declarations about how we're supposed to behave toward those, but as a manager, it allows me to ma…”
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: Assuming plans cannot fail impairs success; decision-makers must find vulnerabilities
“Believing that this thing that you've created is impenetrable to failure is not a really great way to make sure that you succeed, but rather that they needed to be combing over the plans as if they were the rebels to try to figure out if they were to fail, how…”
Duke: Positive thinking belongs in goal setting, not route execution
“We don't want to confuse the route planning with the destination planning. You figure out where you want to go, and then when you look at a paper map, it's like the power of positive thinking. Oh, look at these clear roads. I'm going to go on this road, and th…”
Duke: Uncertainty and luck untether outcome quality from decision quality
“Uncertainty, luck, hidden information, all of the stuff that makes our judgment so subjective, that untethers the quality of outcomes from the quality of decisions, that I can feel having this influence on the way I make decisions.”
Duke: Individual experience can actively interfere with decision learning
“And the paradox of experience is that experience is certainly necessary in order to become a better decision maker. But it's in no way sufficient. And in fact, the paradox is that any individual experience that you might have can actually interfere with learni…”
Duke: Counterfactual thinking should be applied forward, not backward
“Really, the best way to solve this is to not to try to look back and reconstruct all of that, but to actually do that looking forward as you're entering to new decisions.”