102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2020

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The best chess and Go players in the world aren’t human beings any more; they’re artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for understanding how rationality works in real-world situations: it features stochastic events, incomplete information, Bayesian updating, game theory, reading other people, a battle between emotions and reason, and real-world stakes. Maria Konnikova started in psychology, turned to writing, and then took up professional-level poker, and has learned a lot along the way about the challenges of being rational. We talk about what games like poker can teach us about thinking and human psychology.

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Maria Konnikova received her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She is currently a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of two bestselling books, The Confidence Game and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Among her awards are the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. She is a successful tournament poker player and Ambassador for PokerStars. She is the host of The Grift podcast. Her new book is The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Minescape Podcast.
0:02.6	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.6	Long time listeners will know that one of the topics I'm very interested in here on
0:08.2	the podcast is thinking, rationality, how human beings cotitate to make decisions about
0:14.2	the world, and even longer term listeners will know that I love using the game of poker
0:18.6	as a model for thinking about human rationality.
0:21.9	Of course, poker is a very finite, well-defined game.
0:24.6	You know what the rules are, you know what the rewards are, but it models a lot of the
0:28.4	circumstances that are very important when we're making hard decisions in our everyday
0:32.4	lives.
0:33.4	Poker is a game of incomplete information.
0:35.8	We don't know what our opponents have.
0:38.2	It's a game where there's randomness involved.
0:40.3	You don't know what the next card is going to be.
0:42.7	It's a game where there probably is a strategy, which will at least guarantee you won't
0:47.8	lose over the long term, but you might not know what that strategy is.
0:51.8	You have to be a good Bayesian, you have to do your best to model your other opponents,
0:56.2	etc.
0:57.3	Perhaps most of all, poker is a game where even if you know cognitively, consciously,
1:03.5	what the best strategy is, sometimes it can be hard to obey, to follow that best strategy.
1:09.8	You can be what in poker terms is called on tilt.
1:13.1	Your emotions can get in the way and your rationality can suffer thereby.
	...

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