Exhalation

"I think this is an important book. Decision-making becomes even more difficult if you look at it only from one perspective. I wanted to select five books that approach the same problem from a lot of different angles. Noise is an incredibly academic take on making decisions despite inconsistency in observed phenomena. But What If We’re Wrong? contains Chuck Klosterman’s essays about historically inaccurate ideas viewed from his perspective. The Biggest Bluff depicts Maria Konnikova tracking her own self-improvement in understanding the imperfect-information game of poker. In Money Games , Weijian Shan is doing it on a private equity scale with banks. In my opinion, Ted Chiang is the best science fiction writer of his generation. Exhalation is one of my favorite books by him — incidentally, this book was recommended to me by my now-fiancée on our first date. The thing I love most about it is how it approaches decision-making conundrums both from a science fiction perspective and through a literary fiction lens. It’s a series of short stories, and I just want to point out the two stories that really gripped me. “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” is a story about free will. In it, people can buy devices that let them see into alternate versions of themselves, and by observing their alternate selves they change their decision-making in their own world. If we could see how our lives pan out under different choices and reflect that, we would greatly improve our decision-making. However, we don’t need a science fiction device to have this introspection. This is how we work all the time, and it would be awesome to be more explicit about it. As an entrepreneur , one thing I always recommend to other entrepreneurs is not to take on any project for which the end outcome is not something you want. If you want to be a sponsorship sales team that does agency work on behalf of clients, like the WME/IMGs of the world, that’s a good thing to go after. But if you don’t want to do that, don’t build your business in approaching agency work, and then realize ten years down the line that you don’t like being an agent. That’s not a good way to live your life. I was talking to a former high-stakes poker player, Jay Rosenkrantz, who used to make millions of dollars a year. He even had a show called 2 Months, $2 Million . After the poker crash, he became an entrepreneur and has done all sorts of cool and interesting work on the cutting edge of entertainment. But at the end of the day, if money was his only objective, if he had stayed playing online poker, he would have made more money, and if he had become a trader, he certainly would have made more money. Would he make the same decision, knowing what he knows now? Who knows. But would he have made the same decision, knowing what he knew then? 100 per cent. That’s how we know he’s a good decision-maker. The way he thinks about the world accounts for the opportunity costs of pursuing different actions and he’s thinking the same way as he would if he had a device that showed alternate versions of himself. Another Chiang story from this collection I love to talk about is called “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.” It’s about a journalist living in a society where everyone has a chip implanted in their brains to record everything that has happened, and how the observed reality is different from how we feel about it. This is very much a case of uncertainty. What’s actually true may not be true to us in a lot of ways. “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” explores our perception of reality, because our perception is subjective. If we recognize this, it allows us to do better on breaking out of the mold, on questioning our perceptions and our priors, and on seeing what’s happening in the world. This comes up all the time in my favorite poker books — not just The Biggest Bluff but also Play Optimal Poker by Andrew Brooks and Modern Poker Theory by Michael Acevedo : we know what the reality should be, but the next step is recognizing that you’re not a robot. And the next step after that is adapting heuristics since you know you’re not a robot. I love Exhalation . There are a lot of great stories in this collection, and I can talk endlessly about them. I think it’s important to read fiction. It’s such an important contribution to this discussion because it forces us to see the world as it could be, and helps us break out of our preexisting molds."