Editor’s letter

“Poker pushes you out of your illusions,” says the writer and now champion player Maria Konnikova—“beyond your incorrect comfort zone—if, that is, you want to win.” Konnikova’s book about poker, The Biggest Bluff, was released in June, and you’ll find it anchoring our Books page this issue. I am not sure that it is, as one reviewer writes, the best book ever written about the game; Al Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town holds its own. But it may be the best if you are looking for a message that you can take away from the poker table. Konnikova holds a Ph.D. in psychology, and a focal point of her research is how quickly people make up their minds and how unwilling they are to change them. In the book, Konnikova basically makes one big bet: If, with the help of the world’s best players, she can train herself to question every hand and strategy, she could play the game at a world-class level. The bet pays off.

All through this week I kept thinking of Konnikova’s research and her project. One of the great paradoxes of psychology— maybe the great one—is that while being wrong should make us question our assumptions, it regularly has the opposite effect. Presented with signs that we have made a mistake, we very often choose to discard the evidence and dig in on our prior beliefs. So it is that once they’d committed to reopening, governors across the country chose to ignore every early signal that they were wrong and push onward into the cresting wave of a resurgent epidemic. And when what is involved are questions not just of policies but also of values, people retreat even further into their certainties. You can see that in our Last Word this week, about some of the last defenders of the Confederate flag. Seeing where others go astray, though, is easy. Examining your own assumptions is vastly harder. But worth it—if, that is, you want to win.

Managing editor