rossry

• rossryJul 12, 2024, 6:31 PM

  6 points

  1

  in reply to: Ben Millwood’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  it’s not too hard to come up with a protocol

  For example: A moves the piles with B watching and C+D looking away, then C removes 1 /​ 3 /​ 3 /​ 5 cards from random piles and shuffles them together with D watching and A+B looking away.

• rossryJul 12, 2024, 6:25 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: max-sixty’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  Oh, I agree. Sort-of-relatedly, I asked a few poker pros at Manifest why we conventionally play 8-handed when we play socially, and my favorite answer was “because playing heads-up doesn’t give you enough time to relax and chat”. (My second-favorite, which is probably more explanatory, was “it’s more economical for in-person casinos, and everyone else apes that.”) And if you talk to home-game pros, they will absolutely have thoughts about how to win money on average while keeping their benefactors from knowing that they’re reliably losing. The format of the game we play is shaped by social-emotional-economic factors other than pedagogy, but which are real incentives all the same.

  Is there some way of making games like Figgie also have some of these properties?

  I mean, Figgie itself is not purely skill-testing; you can always blame the cards, or other blame A for feeding B and losing but also causing you to lose, or any number of other things.

  If you wanted to make it fuzzier on purpose, I think you could do the thing that often gets proposed for dealing it at home, which is to deal 40 cards out of a 52-card deck and call the goal suit the opposite of the longest suit (which might not be 12), with some way to break ties. I think it’s a worse pedagogical game for being less clear—not unrelated to the fact that it will make it harder to figure out why you’re winning or losing. And my guess is that the skill ceiling is higher, also not-unrelatedly.

• rossryJul 12, 2024, 6:14 PM

  8 points

  2

  in reply to: Ben’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  Notice your confusion! It isn’t zero-sum at the level of each individual exchange. If you’d like the challenge of figuring out why not (which I think you can probably do if you load in a 4-minute bot game, don’t make any trades yourself, double-check the scoring, and think about what is happening), then I think it would be a useful exercise!

  If you want the spoiler:

  The player with the most of the goal suit gets paid a bonus of 100 or 120; this is the portion of the pot not paid out as ten chips per card. When two players trade a particular card from A who has less of that suit to B who has more of that suit, it’s zero-sum for them in terms of the per-card payout but positive-sum for them in terms of the bonus (at the expense of the players not participating), since it makes it more likely that the buyer will beat a non-participating player for the bonus (but not less likely that the seller will win it).

Pod­cast: “How the Smart Money teaches trad­ing with Ricki He­ick­len” (Pa­trick McKen­zie in­ter­view­ing)

• rossryJul 11, 2024, 10:39 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: angmoh’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  For a good player sitting with a person who thinks ‘all reds’ is a good hand, it’ll be obvious before you ever see their cards.

  I basically agree that it will be obvious to you (a reasonable poker player) or even to me (an interested and over-theorized amateur), but as I said in a cousin comment, what actually matters is whether it’ll be obvious to the student making the mistake, which is a taller order.

  I think that “all reds” is overstated as literally written (I mean, you’ll eventually go to showdown and have it explained to you), but I mean it to gesture at a broader point, and because the scene in Eleven is too good not to quote.

• rossryJul 11, 2024, 10:29 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: FinalFormal2’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  I’d also be happy to log on and play Figgie and/​or post-match discussion sometime, if someone else wants to coordinate. I realistically won’t be up for organizing a time, given what else competes for my cycles right now, but I would enthusiastically support the effort and show up if I can make it.

• rossryJul 11, 2024, 10:27 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: FinalFormal2’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  You know, I had read the football /​ futsal thesis way back when I was doing curriculum design at Jane Street, though it had gotten buried in my mind somewhere. Thanks for bringing it back up!

  If I’m being honest, it smells like something that doesn’t literally replicate, but it has a plausible-enough kernel of truth that it’s worth taking seriously even if it’s not literally true of youth in Brazil. And I do take it seriously, whether consciously or not, in my own philosophy of pedagogical game design.

• rossryJul 11, 2024, 10:22 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  Appreciate it, Ray.

  I definitely don’t think this is the definitive word on how we [quickly, efficiently, usefully, comprehensively...] train epistemic skills. In my opinion, too many blog posts in the world try to be the definitive word on their thesis instead of one page in an ongoing conversation, and I’m trying to correct that instinct in myself. Plausibly I could have been clearer about this epistemic status up-front.

  In any case, I’m looking forward to getting to revisit this post in the context of my LessOnline conversations with Max, and with the lessons we both learn as we design and run the AI-games course.

• rossryJul 11, 2024, 10:16 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: kave’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  I agree that I’m conflating a few different teaching objectives, and there are dimensions of “epistemics” that that trading in general doesn’t teach. But on this I want to beg forgiveness on the grounds of, if I was fully recursively explicit about what I meant and didn’t mean by every term, the post would have been even longer than it was.

  I do have another long post to write with working title “What They Don’t Teach You in Your Quant Trading Internship” about the ways that training in trading doesn’t prepare you for other important things in the world, or will actively interfere with having good intuitions elsewhere.

  All that being said, I think that if you think “which feature should I build” doesn’t have something to learn from Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection, I posit that there’s something missing.

• rossryJul 10, 2024, 8:19 PM

  11 points

  3

  in reply to: Dave Orr’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  That all sounds right, but I want to invert your setup.

  If someone is playing too many hands, your first hypothesis is that they are too loose and making mistakes. If someone folds for 30 minutes, then steals the blinds once, then folds some more, you will have a hard time telling whether they’re playing wrong or have had a bad run of cards.

  But in either case, it is going to be significantly harder for them to tell, from inside their own still-developing understanding of the game, whether the things that are happening to them are evidence about their own mistakes or anomalous luck or just the way the game is. Even more so if their opponents are playing something close to GTO rather than playing way-off-equilibrium exploits.

  And, from a pedagogical perspective, the thing that I am usually trying to optimize for as a teacher is whether the game teaches itself to a student who is still largely confused—not whether the game can be appreciated by a student who has already reached a level of understanding of the concepts it’s being used to teach.

• rossryJul 10, 2024, 8:12 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: followthesilence’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  (Separately from my sibling comment,) I think agree that the richest source of insight from poker is to be had in evaluating other players’ off-equilibrium behavior and determining how to respond with off-equilibrium behavior of your own.

  I think that it is easy to dramatically over-estimate how much of this the typical student(*) will actually do in their first several-hundred hours of playing the game. At a minimum, I think (I think common?) idea that the idea that GTO post-flop play is an intermediate-level technique and exploitative play is an advanced-level technique is correctly ordered if you’re trying to reduce your $ losses at a strong social table, but backwards if you’re trying to use the game as mental weightlifting. And the fact that it took me a decade after starting to casually learn the game to understand the preceding sentence is, at a minimum, a critique of how pedagogy-through-poker is nearly always done in practice.

  (*) and I mean the term “student” broadly, to include professionals-in-training and adult learners looking to re-train

  In fact, it wasn’t until my conversation with Max that I appreciated that I had spent far too much time working on playing more GTO—which I am still very far from—and that I should probably have started trying to understand and exploit my opponents’ play while I was still definitely bleeding money to my own exploitability. This is the largest thing that I’ve updated on since writing the post, and the thing I’d most want to cover in a part-2 follow-up.

• rossryJul 10, 2024, 7:59 PM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: followthesilence’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  I totally agree that poker (and I’ll restrict to no-limit holdem especially) far surpasses nearly any other game at the broader cluster of goals. And I agree that there is a lot of value in the total of all the lessons you learn by fully mining out poker for insights.

  My issue is really one of relative advantage /​ disadvantage, and of the ratio of grinding to insight across different parts of the learning curve. Together with some amount of, I think it’s significantly more efficient to learn certain components separately and then to put them together than to approach them as one combined package. When I taught new traders, I thought it helpful to expose them to the emotional feeling of risk tolerance separately from the intuitive sense of adverse selection, separately from level-N efficiency /​ level-N+1 marginal, and separately from the skills of quantitative research. Then we’d work on putting the concepts together into increasingly complete exercises, building up to the scale of deploying research-derived algorithmic trading strategies to miniaturized stock markets (and then to real markets, though at some point that left my purview...).

  I don’t mean that it was a strict waterfall model—it’s sometimes extremely helpful to jump ahead temporarily to understand how things come together before going back to focus more on the fundamental components—but as a matter of pedagogical design I feel reasonably confident that jumping straight into an environment with all of the concepts active is suboptimal, especially if having one under-developed makes it actively harder for you to learn another at the same time.

  So yes, I think if you have nearly all of the right skills except for an impatience and a bias towards action, then playing in-person poker and practicing folding 80% of your hands can be just the prescription the doctor ordered. Or if you’re trying to calibrate over-updating versus under-updating on limited information. Or if you’re at a reasonable level at most of the things and are trying to stay sharp. But if you’re early on the learning curve of four different things, then I want to claim it’s not optimal to throw yourself at a game that wraps all of them up in interconnected ways, especially if they’ll be harder to disentangle if you don’t have a solid place to stand—so to speak—in the first place.

• rossryJul 8, 2024, 3:29 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Alexei’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  You can certainly join our mailing list and you’ll hear when we launch remotely!

• rossryJul 8, 2024, 6:13 AM

  22 points

  1

  on: Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

  As mentioned in the opening note, Max Chiswick and I are working on launching an online class that provides a ladder of practical challenges between “write a bot that plays tic-tac-toe” and “write a bot that achieves the 2019 state of the art in no-limit texas holdem”. I’m excited to be working on this and teaching it not because I think that programming game-playing AIs is the great important skill of our time, but because I think that thinking about systematically playing imperfect-information games is one of the best ways to sharpen your skills at systematically reasoning under uncertainty.

  If this is of interest to you, we’ll be running a beta test of the course material from July 15 to August 15, in-person, in San Francisco. More information here or reach out on any channel that reaches me. EDIT: Signups for the beta have gone to a waitlist, as we have more students than capacity. We’re hoping to run additional iterations in-person in NYC and remote-first starting in September, so please sign up to the mailing list if either of those are of interest.

Poker is a bad game for teach­ing epistemics. Fig­gie is a bet­ter one.

• rossryApr 5, 2024, 4:41 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Le­gal­ity as a Ca­reer Harm Assess­ment Heuristic

  In the ranch case, I’m imagining that the protagonist believes that (a) and (b) do outweigh (c) to the net-positive.

  But (c) is still significant, P says, so they conclude that “the benefits seem much larger than the harms, but the harms are still significant”. Furthermore, is (c) “the kind of thing you ought to be able to ‘cancel out’ through donation [and/​or harm-reducing influence]”, or is it more like murder?

  Is it sufficient that (a) and (b) outweigh (c), or is (c) the sort of thing we should avoid anyway?

  In this situation, I feel like I’d be in exactly the target audience that a rule like you’re proposing would be trying to serve, but deferring to legality doesn’t work because society-that-makes-laws is way less strict than I want my decision-making to be about whether it considers (c) a notable harm at all!

• rossryMar 30, 2024, 2:50 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: Le­gal­ity as a Ca­reer Harm Assess­ment Heuristic

  I expect there are other areas where this rule permits careers altruistically-minded people should avoid (even if the benefits seem to dramatically outweigh the costs) or rejects ones that are very important. Suggesting examples of either would be helpful!

  Of the first sort: “The law is wrong and adherence to a stricter standard would be more right.”

  For example, eating farmed meat is legal, and in any conceivable legal system run by 2020s humans it would be legal. But I want an ethical system that can make sense of the fact that I want to eat vegetarian (and don’t want to coerce others not to). Letting “what would enlightened legislators do?” be the whole of the moral sensemaking framework doesn’t really give me a way to do this.

• rossryJan 24, 2024, 5:03 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: Mak­ing a Sec­u­lar Sols­tice Songbook

  Do you have interest in adding songs that have been sung in the Bay Area but not (yet?) in Boston? (e.g., Songs Stay Sung and The Fallen Star from this year) I could get lyrics and chords from the crew here for them, but also would understand if you want to keep it at a defined scope!

• rossryJan 7, 2024, 6:48 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: MIRI 2024 Mis­sion and Strat­egy Update

  Apparently the forum’s markdown implementation does not support spoilers (and I can’t find it in the WYSIWIYG editor either).

  I’m sympathetic to spoiler concerns in general, but where the medium doesn’t allow hiding them, the context has focused on analysis rather than appreciation, and major related points have been spoiled upthread, I think the benefits of leaving it here outweigh the downsides.

  I’ve added a warning at the top, and put in spoiler markdown in case the forum upgrades its parsing.

• rossryJan 5, 2024, 4:14 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: MIRI 2024 Mis­sion and Strat­egy Update

  (Severe plot spoilers for Ra.)

  It’s even less apt than that, because in the narrative universe, the human race is fighting a rearguard action against uploaded humans who have decisively won the war against non-uploaded humanity.

  In-universe King is an unreliable actively manipulative narrator, but even in that context, his concern is that his uploaded faction will be defenseless against the stronger uploaded faction once everyone is uploaded. (Not that they were well-defended in the counterfactual, since, well, they had just finished losing the war.)

  I am curious how cousin_it has a different interpretation of that line in its context.