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 16 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
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: 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, …”
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 …”
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, …”
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.”
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…”