Annie Duke was a grad student in psychology who was nearly done with her dissertation when she got sick and took a leave of absence. She ended up dropping out of grad school and becoming a very successful professional poker player (guided by her brother, who had already taken that career path). Using insights from both her career and her time in academia, she has written a useful and thought-provoking book on, as the subtitle says, “Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.”
The biggest takeaway from this book, as far as this blog is concerned, is her insistence that academia is too slanted to the left (pp. 145ff.), which entails that the leftists in academia are not getting useful corrections from colleagues on the right. (Recall that the purpose of this blog is to encourage leftists to be self-critical and not just critical of others.) The fact that so many studies in the social sciences cannot be replicated seems to bear her out (149). Of course, she’d say the same thing if academia were too slanted to the right, but that is a situation that we are not likely to see in the next fifty years. It is its slant to the left that is of concern, and it is quite commendable of her (given that she was once part of academia) to want a change.
Here are some other points she makes:
• Chess is not a good analogy for most decisions we make because all the information is already in plain sight, except of course for what one’s opponent will do next. But that can easily be anticipated. In poker, on the other hand, there is a lot of information that we do not have.
• She criticizes what she calls resulting, which is labeling a decision as good if it turned out well, and labeling it as bad if it turned out poorly. I had to admit that I had done this in connection with my decision to go into academia. It turned out poorly, so I’ve thought of it as a bad decision. After reading her book, I changed my mind. I had assumed that academia was a segment of society where I would be judged by the quality of my ideas, and instead I was judged solely on where I had gone to school. But I do have to admit it was a good assumption, and maybe even there are parts of academia where it is true. But it is not true in my area (Greek philosophy).
Anyway, poker players who think they made good decisions when they have won and bad ones when they have lost never improve. It’s important, she believes, to analyze one’s decisions even when one wins to see if one couldn’t have done even better, or to see if it was just luck that led to the win.
• People who evaluate their decisions often engage in self-deception. Apparently, in accidents involving a single vehicle, “37% of the drivers still found a way to pin the blame on someone else” (90). She then tells a hilarious tale about the scientist John von Neumann, who after crashing into a tree gave this excuse:
I was proceeding down the road. The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 MPH. Suddenly, one of them stepped out in my path. Boom!
It’s incredible that someone so intelligent would make such a statement.
Meanwhile, the current queen of blame-shifting is Hillary, who insists (without any proof) that in the last election married women deferred to their husbands and even their bosses on whom to vote for. A little self-criticism would have led her to suspect that the polls were misleading because her side had demonized not only Trump, but Republicans; accordingly, lots of people may have misled poll-takers (or else refused to take the polls at all). Had she figured this out ahead of time, she might have spent more time campaigning in key states rather than racking up more votes in California and New York.
• The author strongly approves of John Stuart Mill’s respect for diversity of opinion in On Liberty. This is what has led to her critique of academia today. “It is a lot easier to have someone else offer their perspective than for you to imagine you’re another person and think about what their perspective might be” (139). Sadly, it is the latter method that is the way that most liberals and leftists act today. Instead of realizing that some people are simply voting for economic reasons, they have insisted that they are voting on the basis of their racism or sexism.
Similarly, with respect to the Muslim problem, leftists are engaged in wishful thinking. Instead of listening to leftists and former leftists who have actual experience with Muslims, they are demonizing them and believing what they want to believe. Leftists and former leftists with actual experience with Muslims include Bruce Bawer, who left America for Europe where he thought that the religious right was less of a problem than it is here; he found out it was the exact opposite. It also includes Phyllis Chesler, who was married to a Muslim and stuck in Afghanistan for some time. Those in favor of Muslim immigration simply say that all these people are racists, and that is the end of the matter for them.
• She is critical of peer review when it is done in a community that is politically homogeneous because there is much less protection against error (147). Yup, that’s what I’ve been saying for a long time, except that I would add that it doesn’t need to be homogeneous just politically to lack this protection. It can be homogeneous in other ways, too, and still lack it.
• Although she doesn’t explicitly say it, academia would be better off if there were formal and public debates (with hecklers punished by the administration), so that people can learn what the other guy’s position is. Not many on the left could repeat my objections to open borders.
• She gives lots of advice on how to be more objective and learn from other people. If someone you don’t like makes a big sale, you shouldn’t attribute it to luck, but ask what they did right. If someone we like tells us a story about something bad happening to them, we should imagine how we’d think about it if someone we didn’t like told the same story. We should, when we encounter the opinions of people on the opposite side of the fence, look for what they believe that we agree with.
• Finally, she talks about something called “backcasting.” This is the opposite of forecasting, but it isn’t looking back at something that has already happened, but imagining right now that you have gone into the future and are looking back at how your current decisions turned out. For example, say that you decide today that you want to lose weight. Backcasting is imagining right now that you are six months in the future, and you are thinking about what you did to lose that weight, or alternatively, what prevented you from losing weight. It turns out that we often forget about the social pressure to have birthday cake or indulge on other such occasions. We may decide, after engaging in some backcasting, that what we are aiming at is not a realistic goal.
While what she says is quite sensible, I doubt if it will be enough for anyone on the left to start listening to anyone on the right. Leftists believe that they don’t need to take her suggestions because they are already critical of society, and they believe that that is enough. Being critical of society allows them to see problems that others don’t see, so why should they be critical of themselves? That would be pointless because the real problem is (right-wing) society and not themselves. I myself had this mindset for decades, but eventually I realized that being self-critical was important, if only for consistency's sake, but also because it reveals so many problems about the left and oneself that are usually hidden.
Any leftist who is frustrated by the election of Trump should read this book and become a self-critical leftist. They will then have a much clearer understanding of why Trump won and will hopefully stop pointing the finger of blame at everyone but themselves and their candidate.
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