Friday, June 18, 2021

Rabbit Hunting

I played a lot of poker when I was at university and the early stages of work. Poker has a thing called “Rabbit Hunting”. When someone makes the decision to fold, but they ask the dealer to show what the next card “would have been”. It is irrelevant. If it is truly random, you didn’t know the rabbit when you folded. All the cards still in the deck, that you haven’t seen already, could be that card. Your decision has to be made in the light of uncertainty. The world we are in is not a single safe path. There are multiple ways things can play out. You need to be able to take account of all those paths, including in how you judge yourself. Don’t judge yourself purely on how things played out. How they could have played out is just as important a part of the learning process. A decision can still be a bad decision, even if the result was good. Which is not the way that we tend to think. Success carries far less information, and far more danger, than failure. 



No comments: