Poker and rationality aren’t close to excellently correlated. (Poker and math is a stronger bond.) Poker players tend to be very good at probabilities, but their personal lives can show a striking lack of rationality.
Poker teaches only a couple of significant rationality skills (playing according to probabilities even when you don’t intuitively want to; beating the sunk-cost fallacy and loss aversion), but it’s very good at teaching those if approached with the right mindset. It also gives you a good head for simple probability math, and if played live makes for good training in reading people, but that doesn’t convert to fully general rationality skills without some additional work.
I’d call it more a rationality drill than a rationality exercise, but I do see the correlation.
(As qualifications go, I successfully played poker [primarily mid-limit hold ’em] online before it was banned in the States. I’ve also funded my occasional Vegas trips with live games, although that’s like taking candy from a baby as long as you stay sober—tourists at the low-limit tables are fantastically easy to rip off.)
Poker also requires the skill of identifying and avoiding tilt, the state of being emotionally charged leading to the sacrifice of good decision-making. A nice look of the baises which need to be reduce to play effective poker can be found at Rationalpoker.com.
I suppose poker is more of a rationality drill than exercise, and just a physicist may be successful in his field while having a broken personal life, so may a poker player fall to the same trap.
Poker teaches only a couple of significant rationality skills (playing according to probabilities even when you don’t intuitively want to; beating the sunk-cost fallacy and loss aversion), but it’s very good at teaching those if approached with the right mindset. It also gives you a good head for simple probability math, and if played live makes for good training in reading people, but that doesn’t convert to fully general rationality skills without some additional work.
I’d call it more a rationality drill than a rationality exercise, but I do see the correlation.
(As qualifications go, I successfully played poker [primarily mid-limit hold ’em] online before it was banned in the States. I’ve also funded my occasional Vegas trips with live games, although that’s like taking candy from a baby as long as you stay sober—tourists at the low-limit tables are fantastically easy to rip off.)
Poker also requires the skill of identifying and avoiding tilt, the state of being emotionally charged leading to the sacrifice of good decision-making. A nice look of the baises which need to be reduce to play effective poker can be found at Rationalpoker.com.
I suppose poker is more of a rationality drill than exercise, and just a physicist may be successful in his field while having a broken personal life, so may a poker player fall to the same trap.