[The Knowledge Project Ep. #37] Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong

Shane: Annie, welcome to the show. I want to start with how someone who was originally on chart to become a PhD in linguistics of all things, writing a thesis on something called syntactic bootstrapping no less, ends up as a professional poker player. That’s a hell of a switch.

Annie: Well first of all, I’m impressed that you dug up the syntactic bootstrapping bit. I usually just say cognitive science or language learning. Yeah, I kind of had a winding path. I went to graduate school. I was studying syntactic bootstrapping, which for those people who are interested, is the theory that children learn their first language because they have an innate grammar built in, and if you can access the grammar, that’s what allows you to bootstrap the meanings of the words that you’re hearing in the language stream. So that’s what I was studying. Right at the end of it, I’m talking five years in, on my way to my first job talk actually at NYU, I got sick. I had been struggling with some stomach issues that year and I got really sick, right as I was going out into the job market, and actually landed in the hospital for two weeks.