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Dealing with the Cards You’re Dealt: Optimal Group Decision-Making in Practice (The Mertonian Norms), with Annie Duke, Retired Professional Poker Player and Author, Thinking in Bets
So, we’ve got this really good charter. Our charter is accuracy, accountability, and diversity of viewpoint, viewpoint diversity. So we’ve got that in our charter so now the question is how do we implement that? How do we talk to each other as a group in order to actually make sure that we’re executing on that charter?
Communism
I’m so thankful to Phil Tetlock for pointing me back in this direction toward a guy named Robert Merton. He came up with these norms for science called the Mertonian norms. And they have an acronym it’s CUDOS. We can implement that into the way that we’re sort of interacting with the world. So I’m going to go through them super fast.
C: Communism, not the political kind. It’s communism of data and detail. So, first of all, you have to make a commitment to always share details, the ones that make you feel uncomfortable or actually argue against what your beliefs are or what you’re trying to argue for. And within the group the people who are in the room should always be querying you on that, is there anything you haven’t shared because it’s uncomfortable? Is there anything that you haven’t shared with us because you think it might argue against your belief or against the conclusion that you’ve come to or whatever it might be? And you should be willing to query each other in that way. So, the people in the group should become very good data extractors.
And then I also just need a template so there needs to always be details that are always shared. In poker, it would be things like what position was I in the betting? Was I betting first? Was I betting second? How had I’ve been doing recently, was I winning or losing? How has the other person been doing? When they bet exactly how much did they bet? What did they do? And you as a group can work together to figure out not around a specific decision, but whenever we’re analyzing something of this type what are the things that we need to know in order to be able to make a high fidelity decision about it or to give good advice?
There’s actually a great story from sports of John Madden talking about thinking like oh I’m the hottest guy in football and he goes into a seminar with Vince Lombardi who is just talking about one play, I think it was a sweep or something like that and he spent eight hours on it. That’s the kind of detail that you should go into to be able to analyze anything.
Universalism
U: in CUDOS Universalism. When we hear things from people that we don’t like we tend to discount what they have to say. But the objective truth is the objective truth. So whether you like or dislike the person you should be able to evaluate that in absence of that. So the way that you can implement that within your own life or your own business is when you are trying to vet information that you’ve heard or an opinion and that you have heard do not tell the people that you’re trying to vet it with who you heard it from. Just cordon it off and evaluate whatever it is on its own merits without infecting people with the messenger.
When vetting information or opinions with others, don’t tell the vetters who you heard it from. Ask them to evaluate it on its own merits. Now, another thing that you can do is imagine that the other person had said it. So if you have a bad reaction to what someone from an opposing political party says imagine that somebody that you really like within your own parties said it and just go through that thought experiment. That can also be quite helpful.
Disinterestedness
D: Disinterestedness. Frankly, the biggest conflict of interest is that we want to be right. So when I get new information that comes in I’m going to reason in a way to try to make sure that my beliefs are correct. We all have this conflict of interest and then the problem with the conflict of interest is that it’s contagious, particularly if I’m a team leader. If I’m a team leader people on my team don’t want to disagree with me in general.
So when you say what your belief about something is you have infected your team. You have infected the people around you. When you tell people how something turned out you have infected them with the outcome. And now as you go back to try to analyze and learn from the process, try to figure out how should I adjust my decisions going forward trying to close that learning loop with the people around you in the group they are now infected with your conflict of interest. So keep it out of it. Don’t tell them what you believe when you’re considering, you know, if I’m saying well I’m thinking about strategy AB or C don’t tell them which one you think is right. Just start there. Try to present it in a much more neutral fashion. So just try to keep these sort of natural conflict of interests that have to do with our own cognitive biases out of the process as much as possible so you’re not infecting the people around you with it.
Organized Skepticism
CUDOS. The last one is OS: Organized Skepticism.
It’s the idea that we approach things from the standpoint of why they might not be true rather than why they are. So we’re trying to refrain from confirmation bias to something more productive than confirmation bias, which is actually seeking out dissenting viewpoints, seeking out viewpoint diversity. Because we already know why we think we’re right so that’s not such a useful thing to be doing. It’s much more useful to approach things from why might I be wrong? And if you can approach it from that way then you’re naturally going to be seeking out dissenting views. You’re naturally going to allow somebody to disagree with you without it being viewed as disagreeable because now the game is dissent. The game is why isn’t it true?
There’s all these different ways that you can do that. One is you can just encourage people to say okay why isn’t this going to work? The other thing is you can do like red teams blue teams and now you’ve got a team whose job is to dissent and to think about things skeptically in an organized way exactly as it says. You can have dissent channels, which are anonymous that really give people freedom to think about why things might not work out, why they might disagree with you. And if you think about it organized skepticism this is the way that science proceeds is thinking about things from the standpoint of why they might be wrong. I mean I remember being really struck when I was reading I think it was The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins and it’s somewhere in there he said look, I want somebody to show me a human fossil in the Cretaceous period. Like literally the day they do that I will completely change my mind. And I thought what a beautiful statement of what a scientist is, please show me like I’m not trying to avoid it show me that. That would be a spectacular discovery. That would completely turn science on its head in this like incredibly exciting way. So that’s implementing that scientific norm into your own life so that you can invite people into this world of discovery with you and move your own knowledge forward in a really productive way.