Annie Duke: belief

Transcript context

…It's hard for me to describe properly how humble this man was, and it seems so impossible because his influence was so huge and his intellect was so huge and his insight was so change-making in the areas that he worked. But he was so humble, he really wanted to hear what you thought. He said, "I don't know a lot", he would change his mind. It's funny, I got asked in a class that I was teaching about thinking fast and slow and someone was talking about how there's a lot of studies in there that didn't end up replicating. And what I've seen from a lot of other people in the field who really where their work is defined by some line of work that didn't replicate, where they're really arguing against the fact that it doesn't replicate. Just trying to justify or say, "But no", or this and that. This real lack of open-mindedness to the idea that you know what? Maybe it turns out not to be true and that should be okay. But the thing about Danny was when you talked about it, he was the first one to tell you, "I wish priming wasn't in the book. It doesn't replicate." He was just so open-minded to the idea that he knows what he knows now, but he knows that he doesn't know everything. Another thing that people don't know about him outside of academics I think are that he was one of the pioneers in something called an adversarial collaboration. So one of his favorite things, and he in some ways invented it, was find someone who really disagrees with you and then write a paper with them and try to figure out with them what's the study that would resolve the issue. So an example of that was Danny did work on happiness as it relates to wealth. Kahneman and a collaborator, Angus Deaton, they published a result that got a lot of press about the relationship between money and happiness, and the idea was money doesn't buy happiness beyond $75,000. So that got published in 2010. I'm sure if you ran that exact same study, it would be more than $75,000 now because it would adjust for inflation. But it was like the idea being once your basic needs are met and you're not that worried about paying rent and so on and so forth, it's not going to have that big of an effect. But then a decade later, Matthew Killingsworth said, "That's not true that actually money and happiness are correlated through all the income levels. The more money you have, the more happy you tend to be." Okay, so this is a classic example where people will tear each other down sometimes and that guy's wrong and whatever. And instead, it was Kahneman's like, "All right, let's do it together." And they joined forces along with Barb Mellers to basically try to resolve that issue. He was just always seeking out, it was just like everything was like, why am I wrong? And he was eager and he was excited and he wanted to... I remember having a lunch with him where I realized after the lunch that the whole lunch was him asking me questions about my work. Why is he asking me questions about my work? Right? he wanted to... I remember having a lunch with him where I realized after the lunch that the whole lunch was him asking me questions about my work. Why is he asking me questions about my work? Right? He's Danny Kahneman. But he was just so curious about other people and he just made time for everybody. He just loved the people around him so much. And I think that in the end, it's hard to believe, but I just think that that dwarfs his body of work, which is spectacular. But he as a human being was just so spectacular. And I do think you hear all the time about people who are so incredibly brilliant. It's the brilliant but asshole thing, and it was just so the opposite with him. He was so kind. That's amazing. And it feels like there's probably a strong correlation between people that are curious, always looking for how they're wrong, and finding time to spend it with people to debate and discuss and ask. Feels like there's going to be a strong correlation with that and finding really interesting insights uncovering new things.…

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