How playing poker can help you make decisions
Nature Podcast
podcast@nature.com
4.5 • 893 Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2020
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s podcast, life lessons from poker, and keeping things civil during peer review.
In this episode:
00:44 Deciding to play poker
When writer Maria Konnikova wanted to better understand the human decision making process, she took a rather unusual step: becoming a professional poker player. We delve into her journey and find out how poker could help people make better decisions. Books and Arts: What the world needs now: lessons from a poker player
09:12 Research Highlights
A sweaty synthetic skin that can exude useful compounds, and Mars’s green atmosphere. Research Highlight: An artificial skin oozes ‘sweat’ through tiny pores; Research Highlight: The red planet has a green glow
11:21 Developing dialogues
The peer-review process is an integral part of scientific discourse, however, sometimes interactions between authors and reviews can be less than civil. How do we tread the fine line between critique and rudeness? Editorial: Peer review should be an honest, but collegial, conversation
18:47 Briefing Chat
We take a look at some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time we talk about research into racism, and a possible hint of dark matter. Nature News: What the data say about police brutality and racial bias — and which reforms might work; Nature News: Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings; Quanta: Dark Matter Experiment Finds Unexplained Signal
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Nature. |
| 0:02.0 | In an experiment, I don't know yet. |
| 0:06.0 | Why is Blight so far? |
| 0:08.0 | Like, it sounds so simple. |
| 0:09.0 | They had no idea. |
| 0:11.0 | But now the data's... |
| 0:12.0 | I find this not only refreshing, but at some level astounding. |
| 0:20.0 | Nature. |
| 0:25.7 | Welcome back to the nature podcast. |
| 0:29.3 | This week, a lesson in decision making from poker. |
| 0:32.0 | And when peer review goes sour. |
| 0:33.5 | I'm Charmini Bandelle. |
| 0:34.6 | And I'm Nick Al. |
| 0:47.7 | First up, how do you make a decision? |
| 0:52.8 | Go with your gut, toss a coin, or simply roll the dice. |
| 0:59.0 | Well, chances are that you do not think about your options probabilistically, weighing up the likelihoods of each outcome. |
| 1:01.1 | Nothing personal, just generally humans are quite bad at thinking in this way. |
| 1:06.8 | But there's perhaps a game that can help you with that. |
| 1:10.4 | Poker. |
| 1:16.2 | When it comes to playing the hand you're dealt, making a decision in life, |
| 1:21.4 | mathematician John von Neumann thought that poker was perfect practice. |
| 1:26.6 | He thought that poker was the perfect game to mirror strategic human decision-making |
... |
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