ReSolve Riffs with Annie Duke on Biases and Optimal Decision Making in Markets and Life

This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day, hosted by Adam Butler, Mike Philbrick and Rodrigo Gordillo of ReSolve Global.

“Life – and investing – are more like poker than chess”. This week we had the honor to speak to none other than Annie Duke, former World Series of Poker champion, author of “Thinking in Bets” and “How to Decide”, and thought leader in the field of decision-making. Co-hosted by our good friend Brian Portnoy (founder of Shaping Wealth), the conversation covered:

• How planning for a life in academia led her into a successful poker career
• Applying her background in cognitive science to advance her game – Annie’s “Aha! moment”
• Not all poker is created equal – tournaments, cash games, iterations, and strategic differences
• Nature vs nurture – cognitive flexibility and turning a hedgehog into a fox
• Cognitive Reflection Tests and why they may indicate a larger appetite for conspiracy theories
• The Dunning-Kruger effect, overconfidence and naïve realism
• The pervasive influence of the sunk cost fallacy and how we might keep it in check
• Group think, cognitive laziness and why most people tend to anchor to the first response they hear

We also explored the illusion of explanatory depth (and why often the answer lies within the question), the effects of tight feedback loops, and multiple applications for life and investment decisions. Towards the end we caught on to the fact that Annie had actually been incepting us with ideas from her new book all along. We had been looking forward to this conversation for some time and it exceeded our expectations.

Thank you for watching and listening. See you next week.