our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed A good decision can blow up, and a terrible one can pay off. PhilosophyBusinessBusiness StrategyCognitive BiasesSystems Thinking In my decades of playing soccer, I’ve taken part in hundreds of games. I’ve played in games where we dominated and lost.
I’ve played in games where we were awful yet somehow scraped through to win. I’ve played in games where the other team cheated the whole way through with time-wasting, shirt-pulling, hacking people down at the knees (picture Paraguay’s shithousery against France in the World Cup) and still walked off winners. I hated it, but the result said they were the better side.
If you only looked at the scoreboard, the result justified the means. But the scoreboard doesn’t tell you who played well, who got lucky, or who you became in the process of trying. There’s something missing when you reduce quality to a number.
We make this same mistake looking back on the decisions we make and the results we deliver. Things turn out well, we’re a genius. Things turn out badly, we’re the dumbest person to ever live.
That gap between how something turns out and how well it was actually done is one of the most expensive blind spots we carry, and most of us have no idea we’re doing it. Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned decision scientist and PhD, explains why, and it comes down to poker being a truer test of decision quality compared to, say, chess. Chess is a game of known quantities.
In chess, there’s no hidden information and almost no luck. Every piece is on the board in front of you, and your mistakes are instantly obvious. Your outcomes in the game and the quality of your decisions are highly related.
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