Maria Konnikova
Contributing Writer, The New Yorker · 2 appearances on the record.
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She holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University and is the New York Times bestselling author of The Biggest Bluff, The Confidence Game, and Mastermind. While researching The Biggest Bluff, she trained under Erik Seidel and became an international poker champion with over $1 million in tournament earnings.
21statements → 5claims → 5claims resolved → 80%fully supported → 3.9/5average certainty → 1.9/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
4 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 assertions · 16 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 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 Maria argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Konnikova: Humans differentiate correct from incorrect intuitions roughly 50% of time
“We have intuitions all the time, and we are actually horrible, horrible, horrible at being able to tell the correct intuitions from the wrong intuitions. We're about fifty-fifty, and that's a really bad track record. And sometimes our intuitions are spot on, a…”
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 Maria Konnikova on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Maria Konnikova said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Konnikova: Decision quality must be judged by thought process, not outcomes
“One of the things that he really taught me is that you have to distinguish the action and the outcome from the thought process. As long as your thought process is solid, as long as you're thinking through things correctly, then you did well, even if you ended …”
Konnikova: Betting on opinions improves decision-making through accountability
“Kant says that betting actually forms an integral part to improving your decision process and improving your level of certainty in something, because people can say all sorts of stuff and just make all sorts of pronouncements if they're not held accountable fo…”
Poker improves investors by preventing them from deflecting blame to external noise
“That people say that poker can really help you in the stock market, and I think that that's true, and the reason it can help you become a better investor and make better decisions is the stock market is so damn noisy that when you make bad decisions, there's a…”
Decision quality must be evaluated by thought process, not outcomes
“One of the things that he really taught me is that you have to distinguish the action and the outcome from the thought process. As long as your thought process is solid, as long as you're thinking through things correctly, then you did well, even if you ended …”
Konnikova argues fiction and poetry teach distinct lessons absent from nonfiction
“I'm a huge, huge believer that everyone should be reading fiction and poetry. There are so many people who I really admire who just say, oh, I only read nonfiction because all the other stuff doesn't teach me anything, and I just, I've had this conversation so…”
Konnikova: Humans differentiate correct from incorrect intuitions roughly 50% of time
“We have intuitions all the time, and we are actually horrible, horrible, horrible at being able to tell the correct intuitions from the wrong intuitions. We're about fifty-fifty, and that's a really bad track record. And sometimes our intuitions are spot on, a…”
Konnikova: Intuition should only be trusted when supported by domain expertise
“What correct intuition is, is all of this experience that we've accumulated in something that we don't necessarily have conscious access to the process of acquiring, and so your intuition should only be trusted if you're an expert in this area, if there's a re…”
Chance and variance are indifferent to human effort and merit
“Chance, you know, it's just, it's variance. It doesn't care if you're a good person. It doesn't care how hard you've worked. It doesn't care about anything. I mean, it's just random stuff that happens”
Konnikova: Poker's low-noise environment enables rare decision process interrogation
“The lack of outside noise makes you able to question your decision process in a way that you can't in real life.”
Forcing people to bet on their opinions improves their decision-making quality
“Betting actually forms an integral part to improving your decision process and improving your level of certainty in something, because people can say all sorts of stuff and just make all sorts of pronouncements if they're not held accountable for it. However, …”
Humans distinguish correct from incorrect intuitions at only a 50-50 rate
“Because one of the things I learned in psychology is that, you know, we have intuitions all the time, and we are actually horrible, horrible, horrible at being able to tell the correct intuitions from the wrong intuitions. We're about fifty-fifty, and that's a…”
Intuition should only be trusted in areas of deep accumulated expertise
“Because what correct intuition is, is all of this experience that we've accumulated in something that we don't necessarily have conscious access to the process of acquiring. And so your intuition should only be trusted if you're an expert in this area, if ther…”
Poker tilt is caused by positive emotions like overconfidence, not just anger
“What tilt means is that you've let emotion into your thought process, irrelevant emotion into your thought process. Usually it's negative. So, and by negative, I mean the negative emotion. So for instance, you lose a really big pot. So you lose a lot of money …”
Patients unable to feel fear make catastrophic gambling decisions
“There's psychological work that shows that people who can't experience certain emotions like fear because they have neural damage, they actually make really bad gambling decisions and they go broke because they just don't care. They have no risk conversion wha…”
Sherlock Holmes exemplifies non-linear creative leaps, not just step-by-step hyper-rationality
“People think of Sherlock Holmes as kind of a, someone who's a very, very rational ABC decision-making guru, you know, someone who you should look at as just the model of hyper-rationality, and yet when you start reading the stories, you see that one of the rea…”
Early bad luck bankrupts potentially brilliant players before their skill materializes
“Over the long term, skill does emerge triumphant as long as you never got incredibly unlucky to begin with. So I think that there are probably a lot of people who could have been brilliant poker players who had a horrible run of luck at the beginning and just …”
Annotating books actively aids synthesis and tracks personal intellectual evolution
“I like writing in books because it doesn't just help you Process things and make sure that you're going through them in a thoughtful way and actually kind of synthesizing thoughts and thinking as you're reading as opposed to being just passively absorbing it, …”
Konnikova: No-limit Texas hold 'em remains computationally unsolved
“Poker actually, no limit hold him is still unsolved.”
Great coaches act as connectors to highly specific domain specialists
“I think what a great coach does is know who specializes in the different elements that you need, and is able to make those connections.”
Konnikova: Professional poker tournament fields are 97% male
“Because let's just do a little caveat here to say that poker, professional poker is about 97% male. So a woman, being a woman in poker is being a huge outlier. I mean, three percent of you in any given tournament field.”
Online poker accelerates learning by drastically increasing the volume of hands played
“Online is an easy way to learn because of the sheer volume of hands. You have a computer dealing hands, so it's just, it's really quick. So whereas in live poker, you know, in an hour you might play, I don't know, 30 hands, maybe even fewer, depending on the t…”
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| TKP Insights: Making (Even) Better Decisions | Oct 25, 2022 | 17m |
| #89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry | Aug 4, 2020 | 1h 18m |