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Outcomes and decisions are loosely linked in some games
- Annie uses the example of poker, but it applies to other areas as well. There are uncertain systems where outcomes and decisions are loosely linked.
- In poker, you can have the best hand and get crushed or a poor hand and win
- How do you separate yourself from the outcomes and sift through the noisey feedback?
- You have to figure it out after the fact and after memory has gotten in the way
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An effective approach to uncertain systems is based on cognitive psychology
- how are you constructing a model of your opponent?
- how are you figuring out what the right strategy against them is?
- how are you picking the signal out?
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Learning occurs when there's a lot of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions
- Decisions --> actions --> outcomes --> rewards or pain (ie positive or negative consequences)
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We all use mental models to help us predict the world around us
- We all have some sort of model(s) of how the world works and what's true and what's not
- That's what we're always doing - building models so we can act in it with intention
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Pain gets in the way of learning
- You need the pain in order for it to matter to you to learn
- but pain can get in the way of learning
- But when you're losing, your limbic system lights up and gets in the way of learning
- It does not feel good to lose
- It particularly gets in the way when you're playing a game or doing something where you can attribute learning to your own decisions
- These are decisions you've made based on your mental model of the world and attributing loss to it is perceived by you as an attack on your identity
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We process the world in a way that protects our identity
- Kanheman: we're all trying to create a positive narrative of our life story
- Identity protective cognition
- With the pain / loss, our identity gets attacked if we attribute it to our poor decision making
- So instead, we attribute it to luck
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Humans have a choice: I can take the pain in the short term in order to learn in the long term or attribute it to luck and not learn
- I'm willing to take this pain that doesn't feel very good because in the long run it's going to help me learn
- I'm going to go in, examine my decision and see where I could have improved that would have increased the likelihood of a better outcome
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Most people choose not to feel pain now
- People are willing to take a discount to preserve their self narrative
- They attribute the poor outcomes to luck
- Socialised the result to the world, ie it wasn't my fault, the outcome wasn't in my control
- You don't need to update your identity in anyway - you need to update your beliefs, or made poor choices or the outcome was something you caused
- This choice is devastating to learning
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Most people enable the second choice
- I tell a "bad luck" story
- You sympathise and then share your own
- We both agree it was bad luck that was the cause
- Neither one of us learns
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Bad luck stories have no point
- If you really lost because of bad luck, what's the point of telling a story about it
- There's nothing you can learn from it
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Peer groups are highly influential on your learning
- If you're in a group of people who attribute outcomes to bad luck, you won't learn
- Surrounding yourself with people who constantly seek to update their mental models puts you on a very different learning trajectory
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On our own, we have a very natural tendency to process the world in a way that supports our prior view of the world
- Even if you are aware of the biases, you're still susceptible to them
- Smarter people who know about them are even worse because:
- Once they know about the bias, they're overconfident in thinking they can avoid them
- The better you are at slicing data, the better you are at slicing it in a way that tells a story that doesn't sound biased
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You need to be in a group to overcome the bias
- It's much easier to spot someone elses' bias vs your own
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Create a group that consciously decides to spot biases for each other
- Groups that have a confirmatory style of thought enable one another to not learn and preserve identity
- Instead, create a group that has an exploratory style of thought
- The goal of the group is to create a more accurate mental model of the world
- The group agrees:
- there's an objective truth in the world
- our beliefs are in progress and under construction
- our goal is to help each other to construct better models of the world
- We may disagree with each and that's ok. We may have different values, we may have different strategies that work for us, etc. We may come to different conclusions as a result
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Don't reason to be right, reason to be accurate
- Reasoning to be right affirms your priors
- Reasoning to be accurate helps develop a more accurate mental model of the world
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A social group can be a strong motivator to get better
- Getting a respected peer to think you're good, worthwhile to talk to, an equal --> that feels really good
- The goal of each person is to make better decisions and increase the probability of better outcomes
- Example: I won this hand of poker, but I think I played badly
- The group reinforces learning behavior
- Rewards in the long-term are poor motivators (ie knowing you're a better decision maker in the future isn't a strong reward).
- The short term reward becomes gratification / approval / admiration from the group
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Having this type of group incentivises you to pay more attention to decisions as you make them
- You know a conversation about the decisions you made is going to happen
- You want to have interesting things to ask later
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The group can help create a feeling of tribalism
- The idea that you're different from other people is an important feeling you get from your tribe
- Since most people have confirmatory thinking, having a group that you identify with that values exploratory thinking helps you feel different and that you're doing something difficult
- It makes your tribe special and you special by association
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Create a charter for your group
- We want to focus on accuracy, not on being right
- We want to hold each other accountable
- We want to disagree without being disagreeable
- No one is defensive
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The learning pod helps you catch more mistakes
- There's 100 learning opportunities and left to your own devices, you catch 5 of them
- The learning pod helps you catch 5 more
- That has a huge impact on your learning
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The learning pod helps you catch mistakes faster
- Knowing you're going to be accountable to a group helps you catch mistakes in the moment or right after making them
- Gets you to recognize mistakes in a window that you can actually do something about it
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The learning pod helps you disagree better (without being disagreeable)
- When someone disagrees with us, we can often feel it as an attack on our identity
- That can cause disagreeableness because the information being told is perceived as a threat
- Cause you to:
- be defensive or angry
- be dismissive
- discredit the other person or decide they aren't worth listening to or they have ill intent
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Once you've agreed your beliefs are in progress, they aren't entrenched as your identity
- We've agreed that our beliefs are in progress and under construction
- You are no longer certain about your beliefs
- You have to be willing to hear the other side in order to make progress
- Your identity becomes about acknowledging uncertainty, how good are you at listening to the other side, how good are you at analysing
- Stops you from having that defensive reaction
- You become agreeable in disagreement because you view the disagreement as helpful
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