Annie Duke
Special Partner, First Round Capital · 2 appearances on the record.
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A former World Series of Poker bracelet winner and cognitive psychology researcher, she advises executives and organizations on risk assessment and probabilistic decision-making. She is the author of bestselling books including Thinking in Bets and serves as a Special Partner at First Round Capital.
25statements → 2claims → 2claims resolved → 3.96/5average certainty → 2.04/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 15said about them ↓
2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 assertions · 2 opinions · 20 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Annie argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Annie Duke on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Annie Duke said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: Forcing colleagues to argue opposing positions moderates views and improves decisions
“If you have people in the room who really disagree on what the probability of a particular outcome is, which will happen, force them to change sides, and we disagree. You're at 30% and I'm at 70%. Wow, we're way off. First of all, cool. We're probably going to…”
Duke: Documenting scenario probabilities in advance prevents outcome bias ('resulting')
“You create now, ok, we're going to go with decision A. Here are the scenarios we think might occur. Here are stabs at the probabilities. And you memorialize it. So now, when the thing happens that's right up there on the whiteboard, you took a picture of it. T…”
Duke: Decision quality and outcomes are loosely linked in poker
“Outcomes and decisions are so loosely linked in that game. I mean, you know, you have the best hand, you get crushed, you have the worst hand, you win sometimes, and there's so much hidden information, the cards are face down”
Duke: Fast, abundant feedback does not prevent people from repeating mistakes
“As I continued to play poker, I noticed this over and over again, that people really persisted in their mistakes, despite the fact that there was very clear feedback That was very quick, and there was a lot of it.”
Duke: IBM lost to Apple due to a culture of outcome bias
“And it's, I've always felt that it's because IBM is operating under a culture of resulting, and Apple isn't. Apple can't possibly be Operating under they're doing something unconventional by definition. Their whole business model is to make unconventional choi…”
Duke: Gambling is morally equivalent to voluntary market participation
“I think that that's a perfectly moral thing to do, and so that's the lens through which I view it, is that there's a market, and everybody's playing in the market, and they're voluntarily playing in the market”
Duke: Withholding dissenting perspectives actively violates decision group agreements
“If you withhold information from me, now that's hurting me. You're violating our agreement by not giving me a perspective that disagrees with me. If you have one, you're violating our agreement by not sharing information that you have that might moderate my op…”
Duke: Mastering poker reveals how little a player actually knows
“So as you get better and better at the game, you realize you know less and less about the game in the, in terms of the percentage of the things that you, there are to know about the game.”
Duke: The pain needed to motivate learning also obstructs it
“You need the pain in order for it to matter to you so that you'll learn, but the pain actually gets in the way of learning, and why is that? Because when you're losing, it just lights your limbic system up.”
Duke: Blaming bad outcomes on luck devastates learning
“Now, what you've done there is you've socialized the result to the world. You've offloaded responsibility for this bad outcome to the world. Now, in the short run, that feels good. Because you don't need to do any kind of, like, identity update. You don't need…”
Duke: Table perceptions of gender altered bluffing effectiveness in professional poker
“Strategies that might work for Eric Seidel might not work for me because I'm a woman and he's a man, and so the perceptions of us were very different at the table. So, for example, his ability to bluff in a situation might be really different than my ability t…”
Duke: Truth-seeking groups rewire incentives by immediately rewarding mistake admission
“What happens is that when you set up that kind of group agreement and you really live it, the group is actually reinforcing those kinds of behaviors. So, you know, you can think about habit formation, right? It's that you need to have this reward, and the rewa…”
Duke: Disagreements trigger defensiveness when perceived as identity attacks
“When somebody disagrees with us, we can very often feel it as an attack on our identity. And when that happens, I think that disagreeableness ensues. Because when you feel like you're personally being attacked, that the information that is being told to you is…”
Duke: Basing identity on uncertainty makes disagreement helpful, not threatening
“Your identity now becomes about acknowledging uncertainty, about how good are you at listening to the other side, how good are you at, you know, analyzing those things, and it stops that I, it stops you from having that defensive reaction, and I think naturall…”
Duke: Poker players must treat chips as behavioral tools, not money
“So one of the things that you want to try to do in poker is to separate the chips from the money. You want to view the chips as tools to accomplish a particular goal in a hand and not view it as money at all.”
Duke: Judging decisions solely by outcomes kills workplace innovation
“So what is, if you're a leader and you're a resulter, which we all kind of are, then what you're doing is you're telling employees, don't ever make an unusual choice. Don't do anything innovative or unexpected because if it fails, I will come down on your head…”
Duke: Assigning explicit probabilities makes decision-makers more open-minded
“The desire to make the guess makes you very information hungry, so it actually makes you more open-minded, because now your goal is not, like, I have to have the right answer. It's, I want to try to get as close as I possibly can to what the objective probabil…”
Duke: Premortems fix corporate agreeableness by rewarding failure identification
“When you do a premortem, now you've changed what it means to be a team player, right? Like the people who are going to get pats on the back are the ones who come up with the most creative reasons for failure.”
Duke: Memorializing probability estimates prevents resulting when bad outcomes hit
“And you memorialize it. So now, when the thing happens that's right up there on the whiteboard, you took a picture of it. That didn't work out, and it's got that percentage by it, you know? Okay, well, we thought 33% of the time this was gonna happen, it was g…”
Duke: Leaders stating opinions early causes teams to unconsciously support them
“If the leader expresses their belief about what's correct, in a sense, that acts like an outcome. And the group, without knowing it, and the leader without intending to have that happen, now causes a situation where disagreement with that belief is less likely…”
Duke: Spotting decision mistakes is much harder after winning than losing
“Because it's a lot harder to spot your mistakes when you win. Because, boy, that, it's like not basking in the glow of how great you are. That, that takes a lot. That's really hard, right? In some ways, that's the harder thing.”
Duke: Premortems reward employees for creatively finding failure modes before launch
“When you do a premortem, now you've changed what it means to be a team player, right? Like the people who are going to get pats on the back are the ones who come up with the most creative reasons for failure. And that's going to allow you to now anticipate sor…”
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 …”
The other half of the tape: Annie Duke's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 15 times in 10 episodes on the Knowledge Project. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shane Parrish 4Tom Gaynor 3Marc Andreessen 3Seth Godin 2Todd Simkin 1Les Snead 1Jason Calacanis 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2024 3 mentions in 1 episode
2022 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2021 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| TKP Insights: Making (Even) Better Decisions | Oct 25, 2022 | 16m |
| #37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong | Jul 25, 2018 | 1h 31m |