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I’m a poker virgin. I’ve never played a real game, even though I’m intrigued by it.

I’ve accepted an invitation to a charity poker tournament (Texas Hold’em) put on by a client of ours tonight and am writing this to try to retain some of the ‘tips’ I’ve been reading on the web.

(for experienced poker-playing readers looking for an easy post to mock, here’s your chance. I am aware of how stupid I sound below, though)

First the easy stuff:

• Don’t play drunk, fold more than you think you should, pay attention to what other people are doing, don’t bluff much.
• Card hierarchy. In order: straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair, high card.
• And the basic rules: one player is the dealer (or ‘dealer’) and to his/her left is the small blind then the big blind, who seed the pot after everyone gets their first two cards. After they do this, everyone puts money in in whole number multiples of the big blind. Everyone either folds or matches the largest bet on the table.

I can handle all of the above, but that doesn’t really tell me what to DO.

So here is what I’m going to do.

For the first few hands I’m going to do nothing, maybe not even if I see a top-3 hand.

After that, I’m going to need to start exercising judgment, which I don’t have. Aside from reading the other players (which I have no hope of doing, of course), judgment to me means knowing how to calculate pot odds and money odds. So here’s what I’ve learned about pot odds and money odds.

Pot odds are about understanding what the chances are of getting the card I want next. 52 cards in a deck, 13 cards in a suit, 4 instances of each number. Need to figure out what my chances are of getting a winning hand. Money odds is what my bet is as a share of the pot size. If my pot odds are larger than my money odds, that’s a positive sign.

Some rules of thumb for probabilities:

• The chances of not even getting a pair through the whole session is 50%
• The chance of one pair is 42%.
• This means that a winning hand is probably two-pair or better.
• Two pair is 4.75% and three of a kind is 2.1%
• This means that the higher ones are all less than 0.5% likely.

Now, these odds are all for a 5-card draw, which is only somewhat useful for Hold ’em. I take the magnitudes as important, though.

One pair is useless, two-pair and three-of-a-kind are ok. I should only feel like I have a good shot if I’m reasonably likely to hit a flush or better.

I’m in over my head…

Went to The Today Show the ohter day and heard Journey play “Don’t Stop Believin'” no less than three times. Now that’s a band that’s not scared of playing its hits!

We were standing somewhat towards that back of the crowd but it wasn’t a large crowd and we felt good about our line of sight to the elevated stage. Then the band came out and this is what we saw for the duration of the (very short) set:

What are we seeing here? Smartphone viewscreens and the backsides of signs telling Journey how much they are loved from various obscure parts of middle America is what.

Disappointing? Yep. But there were some good moments, nonetheless. For instace, we awarded the innovation prize to this guy:

It’s a little tough to see, but we have a camera raised up by its tripod for a clear look at the band. Brilliant, right? Well, unfortunatley, our erswhile videographer couldn’t see his camera viewfinder (and we could) and he was only recording the crowd about 15 feet in front of the stage.

The point is that cameras and video recording devices prevented most of the crowd from actually seeing the show. I figured what’s going on is that a few people up front, who can see just fine, hold up their phones or a little personal memento. The people behind them do the same.

After a few rows of this, though, the people who can’t see easily hold their phones higher and higher up. Once we get to the poor suckers at the back, their only hope of ever seeing the show now lies in watching a video on our smartphones when we get home.

It’s too bad, but at least we got to hear the hits.

I’m a big fan of Arnold Kling and Nick Schultz and I think there are a lot of interesting things in this article.

One thing that is nagging at me, though is this:

Perhaps medical services could be delivered by workers with fewer credentials but more rigorous on-the job training… Healthcare providers would be accountable for the quality of their work, not for the certificates hanging on their walls.

When I read that I think of the ways that current healthcare providers are and are not accountable for the quality of their work and wonder at what incremental change might occur on this dimension with the kinds of reforms K&S fantasize about.

Let’ say that people choose their healthcare provider based on reputation, credentials and leave the non-reputational consequences of ‘bad work’ to malpractice insurance and the Reviled Employment Certification Boards.

I’d imagine A&S expect this model to remain intact and might say they’re just enhancing the reputational feedback loop. Perhaps, but I think that, deep down, they really want to dismantle the credentialist evaluation model (ie the “He went to Harvard therefore he’s smart therefore he’s a good doctor therefore I want him for my doctor” model).

I’d like to think about this credentialist problem using a different field I know something more about: financial services.

I’ve actually come to think wages in financial services are high for one simple reason, which I’ll express in the form of a question: “If you had a bunch of money, would you rather pay someone really smart (smarter than you) to manage it or someone not as smart?”

And everything else comes from that. You want someone smart. How do you know he/she is smart? Look at the track record. It’s ok but he’s
pretty smart and convinced you that his record will improve. Okay…  Oh, look! He went to Harvard so he must be smart. Done

Now this smart guy has your money and gets paid really well because he’s smart and you’ve got to lure him away from doctoring, laywering,
physics-ing or whatever and he’s smart so probably figured out a way to screw you just a little bit. Hopefully he can screw some other
people on your behalf now, too!

Now this smart guy makes lots of money so will be happy if the other guys and gals who bring him deals make lots of money, too. They’re
doing most of the “work”, anyway. He mostly just brings the money to the table and evaluates the ideas. Bam! Big banker bonuses are born.

And this smart guy is really rich and really knows his stuff so he gets lots of access to people who don’t know his business that well but thinks what he does is really important and have the power to help/hurt him. And, hey, he’s smart and charming so he spreads the love a bit and these powerful types really trust him now. Bam! Regulatory capture.

And this smart guy seems to have wormed his way into a central part of the financial system. A part that is so critical, we have to have people everyone thinks are the smartest guys in the room.

K&S aren’t likely to change how we evaluate who we think the smartest guys in the room are and that means credentials play a role along with track record.

Even for doctors.

 

Opinions are mostly made up on the fly:

For example, in two surveys spaced a few months apart, the same subjects were asked about their views on government spending. Amazingly, 55% of the subjects reported different answers. Such low correlations at high frequencies are quite representative.

And here’s Robin Hanson:

If you talk a lot, you probably end up expressing many opinions on many topics. But much, perhaps most, of that you just make up on the fly.

BS is something the BSer thinks will sound plausible. It lacks thought behind it because thinking is hard work. A BSer isn’t trying to be a Truth-Seeker, he’s trying to signal intelligence.

What’s interesting about BS is that people have different abilities to detect it, you might call them greater or lesser bull-takers. The grand hope of a bullshitter, of course, is he’s found himself chatting with a bull-taker who will just take it.

Bullshitting (as a phenomenon) is relatively easy to figure out, I think.

But what’s the theory of bull-takers? Why is listening so hard?

Amy Winehouse died at 11am EDT and by 6pm itunes had a little retrospective up on its site.

Here’s my screenshot:Blogging makes newspapers more intelligent and twitter makes them more responsive. Everyone wins.

This website is great.

Now I learn that the best way of thinking of exponents is to think of them as causing numbers to grow. See the link.

And e is the ‘natural’ rate of growth for all things in the universe. Strange metaphor, calling it ‘natural’.

I’m now starting to think of it as the smooth growth version of 1 + 1. Putting two 1s together is the simplest arithmetic. The exponential version of this operation gives you 2.71, not 2. This quote provides an interesting clue:

Every exponent is a variation of e, just like every number is a scaled version of 1.

So if every number in the world is just a bunch of 1s added together (the 1 + 1 operation preformed lots of times), then every exponential operation is just some variation on e.

So e doesn’t need to be a mystery, it’s the default growth rate, like 1 is the default number.

Back to Poisson, where this is giving me another clue:

That’s a bunch of incomprehensible math-blag, but the point here is that the [] term = 1, so the Poisson is just a nifty short-hand way of doing the binomial distribution with lots of n. And the binomial distribution is just picking things with some probability of success.

Now remember lambda is our expected number of ‘hits’ and so 1/lamba is the probability of any hit. All the exp(-lambda) (ie. exp[1/lambda]) does is grow us a cumulative probability threshold, which we can hit with a series of p = 0.5 random events.

I’m getting closer?

No, not the drug:

e has always bothered me — not the letter, but the mathematical constant. What does it really mean?

I love math questions like this. I often find that math people get caught up in the status-affirming qualities of their work, which means that lots of the writing is done is a ‘pure’ notational, logical form.

In other words, math folks speak in their own language because it makes them feel smart at the expense of communicating concepts.

This article is a remedy for all that garboozh.

Apparently it predicts intelligence:

body symmetry more strongly predicts intelligence than brain size, nerve conduction velocity, reaction time reliability, and a number of other measures.

And the point:

The authors suggest that human intelligence may therefore be a “fitness indicator,” like a male peacock’s tail is a sexual advertisement to female peacocks.

Here’s another interesting sentence:

Bodily symmetry may reflect “developmental stability” – i.e., influences like disease, mutation and stress may cause a developmental divergence from DNA’s symmetric blueprint.

(Symmetric blueprint, eh? So nurture wins?)

Now, do I know anything about brain science or evolutionary biology? Absolutely not.

I do know that the measures of intelligence they used (two vocabulary tests and a pattern recognition test), don’t quite nail what I’d call genuine General Intelligence.

Let me put it this way: prospective mates don’t give each other math tests and actually using the vocabulary you’d surely need to ace the “WAIS II vocabulary quiz” could well be a countra-signal of mating fitness (ie being a dorky ‘try-hard’).

These are proxies for intelligence, of course, but not the proxies real people use. For real people, general intelligence is signaled through humor, social facility and (messily) through brute force financial might.

I’m not arguing against the conclusion, nor indeed against the hypothesis. It rings true. I just get the impression that ‘academics’ like to think ‘book smarts’ matters in a direct evolutionary sense. I don’t think it does.

It’s a byproduct. These studies work because intelligence developed for one thing bleeds over into everything else.

Robin Hanson gets it (obviously):

an “intelligent” thing has a great many useful capabilities, not some particular specific capability called “intelligence.”

Just saw Bridesmaids.

I’m not the target market here and the title really made me reluctant but the 90% rotten tomatoes rating did the trick.

It was hilarious.

And I was thoroughly unsurprised to see a producer credit for Judd Apatow at the end; everything about the movie fit his style. The guy owns the heartfelt comedy genre and, even putting aside the fact that he’s allied with all the blue-chip comedy names around, it’s always surprising when someone puts together a movie like his but not with him.

Take The Hangover. A very good, very funny movie. I found it a bit of a strange experience, though, because I’d almost been conditioned to expect that kind of plot to be done in Apatow’s style. I get the same feeling when I watch animated movies not made by Pixar. Good? Sure, often enough.

But it’s like drinking Pepsi when you were expecting Coke. It takes you a second before you realize something’s different, then you can’t get it out of your head. It also takes you a minute to get passed that (if you can) and decide whether you like it better.

Maybe you don’t like it better, but let’s face it, if you like one, you are probably going to think the other is perfectly suitable (brand loyalty aside, since I know people can be ridiculous about these things).

Anyway, I think Apatow probably kicked himself when he saw someone else make a good movie about a bachelor party in Vegas. It’s a plot he would definitely have done eventually. And I don’t know if the world really works like this, but Bridesmaids almost feels like Apatow’s response to The Hangover.

I certainly identify more with the guys in the Hangover, but I probably laughed more in Bridesmaids.

Point, Apatow.