What's the Deal With Forager Ants?

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Forager ants are a part of the colony that's meant to go out and find food, basically. They lay down chemical trails on their way back once they've found food. Once there's a strong pheromone trail laid down, what you'll see is about 10 to 15% of the colonies don't actually get with the program. The other ants are continuing to explore it. It's giving them a backup plan, but it's also allowing them to find something that really should have been A.

Annie Duke is angry that quitting gets such a bad rap. Instead of our relentless focus on grit and "going for it," the former professional poker player, decision strategist, and author of Quit wants us to recognize the costs associated with sticking to a losing outcome. Listen as she explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts how society's conflation of grit with character has made quitting unnecessarily hard, and why our desire for certainty harms our decision-making ability. Additional topics include the flawed mental accounting that makes us confuse wins for losses, what we can learn from ants, and the tragic story of how the refusal to quit cost 16 lives one terrible night at the top of Mt. Everest.