back to indexLiv Boeree: Poker, Game Theory, AI, Simulation, Aliens & Existential Risk | Lex Fridman Podcast #314
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Evolutionarily, if we see a lion running at us,
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we didn't have time to sort of calculate
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the lion's kinetic energy and is it optimal
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to go this way or that way, you just react it.
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And physically our bodies are well attuned
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to actually make right decisions.
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But when you're playing a game like poker,
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this is not something that you ever evolved to do.
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And yet you're in that same flight or fight response.
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And so that's a really important skill
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to be able to develop to basically learn
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how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself
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so that you can think clearly.
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The following is a conversation with Liv Burry,
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formerly one of the best poker players in the world,
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trained as an astrophysicist and is now a philanthropist
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and an educator on topics of game theory,
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physics, complexity, and life.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Liv Burry.
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What role do you think luck plays in poker and in life?
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You can pick whichever one you want,
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poker or life and or life.
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The longer you play, the less influence luck has.
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Like with all things, the bigger your sample size,
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the more the quality of your decisions
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or your strategies matter.
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So to answer that question, yeah, in poker,
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it really depends.
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If you and I sat and played 10 hands right now,
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I might only win 52% of the time, 53% maybe.
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But if we played 10,000 hands,
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then I'll probably win like over 98, 99% of the time.
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So it's a question of sample sizes.
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And what are you figuring out over time?
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The betting strategy that this individual does
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or literally it doesn't matter
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against any individual over time?
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Against any individual over time, the better player
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because they're making better decisions.
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So what does that mean to make a better decision?
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Well, to get into the realness of Gritty already,
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basically poker is a game of math.
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There are these strategies familiar
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with like Nash Equilibria, right?
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So there are these game theory optimal strategies
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that you can adopt.
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And the closer you play to them,
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the less exploitable you are.
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So because I've studied the game a bunch,
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although admittedly not for a few years,
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but back when I was playing all the time,
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I would study these game theory optimal solutions
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and try and then adopt those strategies
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when I go and play.
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So I'd play against you and I would do that.
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And because the objective,
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when you're playing game theory optimal,
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it's actually, it's a loss minimization thing
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that you're trying to do.
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Your best bet is to try and play a sort of similar style.
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You also need to try and adopt this loss minimization.
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But because I've been playing much longer than you,
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I'll be better at that.
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So first of all, you're not taking advantage
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But then on top of that,
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I'll be better at recognizing
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when you are playing suboptimally
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and then deviating from this game theory optimal strategy
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to exploit your bad plays.
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Can you define game theory and Nash equilibria?
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Can we try to sneak up to it in a bunch of ways?
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Like what's a game theory framework of analyzing poker,
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analyzing any kind of situation?
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So game theory is just basically the study of decisions
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within a competitive situation.
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I mean, it's technically a branch of economics,
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but it also applies to like wider decision theory.
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And usually when you see it,
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it's these like little payoff matrices and so on.
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That's how it's depicted.
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But it's essentially just like study of strategies
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under different competitive situations.
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And as it happens, certain games,
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in fact, many, many games have these things
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called Nash equilibria.
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And what that means is when you're in a Nash equilibrium,
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basically it is not,
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there is no strategy that you can take
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that would be more beneficial
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than the one you're currently taking,
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assuming your opponent is also doing the same thing.
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So it'd be a bad idea,
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if we're both playing in a game theory optimal strategy,
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if either of us deviate from that,
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now we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage.
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Rock, paper, scissors
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is actually a really great example of this.
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Like if we were to start playing rock, paper, scissors,
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you know, you know nothing about me
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and we're gonna play for all our money,
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let's play 10 rounds of it.
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What would your sort of optimal strategy be?
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Do you think, what would you do?
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I would probably try to be as random as possible.
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You wanna, because you don't know anything about me,
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you don't want to give anything away about yourself.
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So ideally you'd have like a little dice
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or somewhat, you know, perfect randomizer
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that makes you randomize 33% of the time
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each of the three different things.
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And in response to that,
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well, actually I can kind of do anything,
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but I would probably just randomize back too,
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but actually it wouldn't matter
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because I know that you're playing randomly.
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So that would be us in a Nash equilibrium
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where we're both playing this like unexploitable strategy.
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However, if after a while you then notice
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that I'm playing rock a little bit more often than I should.
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Yeah, you're the kind of person that would do that,
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I'm more of a scissors girl, but anyway.
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No, I'm a, as I said, randomizer.
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So you notice I'm throwing rock too much
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or something like that.
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Now you'd be making a mistake
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by continuing playing this game theory optimal strategy,
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well, the previous one, because you are now,
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I'm making a mistake and you're not deviating
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and exploiting my mistake.
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So you'd want to start throwing paper a bit more often
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in whatever you figure is the right sort of percentage
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of the time that I'm throwing rock too often.
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So that's basically an example of where,
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what game theory optimal strategy is
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in terms of loss minimization,
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but it's not always the maximally profitable thing
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if your opponent is doing stupid stuff,
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which in that example.
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So that's kind of then how it works in poker,
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but it's a lot more complex.
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And the way poker players typically,
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nowadays they study, the games change so much.
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And I think we should talk about how it sort of evolved,
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but nowadays like the top pros
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basically spend all their time in between sessions
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running these simulators using like software
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where they do basically Monte Carlo simulations,
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sort of doing billions of fictitious self play hands.
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You input a fictitious hand scenario,
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like, oh, what do I do with Jack nine suited
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on a King 10 four to two spades board
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and against this bet size.
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So you'd input that press play,
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it'll run its billions of fake hands
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and then it will converge upon
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what the game theory optimal strategies are.
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And then you wanna try and memorize what these are.
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Basically they're like ratios of how often,
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what types of hands you want to bluff
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and what percentage of the time.
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So then there's this additional layer
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of inbuilt randomization built in.
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Yeah, those kinds of simulations incorporate
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all the betting strategies and everything else like that.
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So as opposed to some kind of very crude mathematical model
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of what's the probability you win
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just based on the quality of the card,
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it's including everything else too.
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The game theory of it.
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Yes, yeah, essentially.
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And what's interesting is that nowadays,
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if you want to be a top pro and you go and play
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in these really like the super high stakes tournaments
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or tough cash games, if you don't know this stuff,
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you're gonna get eaten alive in the long run.
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But of course you could get lucky over the short run
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and that's where this like luck factor comes in
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because luck is both a blessing and a curse.
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If luck didn't, if there wasn't this random element
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and there wasn't the ability for worse players
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to win sometimes, then poker would fall apart.
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You know, the same reason people don't play chess
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professionally for money against,
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you don't see people going and hustling chess
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like not knowing, trying to make a living from it
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because you know there's very little luck in chess,
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but there's quite a lot of luck in poker.
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Have you seen Beautiful Mind, that movie?
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Well, what do you think about the game theoretic formulation
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of what is it, the hot blonde at the bar?
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What they illustrated is they're trying to pick up a girl
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at a bar and there's multiple girls.
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They're like friend, it's like a friend group
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and you're trying to approach,
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I don't remember the details, but I remember.
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Don't you like then speak to her friends first
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or something like that, feign disinterest.
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I mean, it's classic pickup artist stuff, right?
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And they were trying to correlate that somehow,
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that being an optimal strategy game theoretically.
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What, what, like, I don't think, I remember.
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I can't imagine that there is,
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I mean, there's probably an optimal strategy.
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Is it, does that mean that there's an actual Nash equilibrium
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of like picking up girls?
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Do you know the marriage problem?
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It's optimal stopping.
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So where it's an optimal dating strategy
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where you, do you remember what it is?
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Yeah, I think it's like something like,
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you know you've got like a set of a hundred people
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you're gonna look through and after,
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how many do you, now after that,
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after going on this many dates out of a hundred,
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at what point do you then go, okay, the next best person I see,
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is that the right one?
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And I think it's like something like 37%.
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Uh, it's one over E, whatever that is.
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Right, which I think is 37%.
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We're gonna fact check that.
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So, but it's funny under those strict constraints,
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then yes, after that many people,
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as long as you have a fixed size pool,
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then you just pick the next person
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that is better than anyone you've seen before.
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Anyone else you've seen, yeah.
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Have you tried this?
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Have you incorporated it?
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I'm not one of those people.
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And we're gonna discuss this.
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I, and, what do you mean, those people?
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I try not to optimize stuff.
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I try to listen to the heart.
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I don't think, I like,
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my mind immediately is attracted to optimizing everything.
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Optimizing everything.
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And I think that if you really give in
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to that kind of addiction,
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that you lose the joy of the small things,
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the minutiae of life, I think.
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I'm concerned about the addictive nature
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of my personality in that regard.
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while I think the, on average,
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people under try and quantify things,
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or try, under optimize.
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There are some people who, you know,
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with all these things, it's a balancing act.
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I've been on dating apps, but I've never used them.
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I'm sure they have data on this,
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because they probably have
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the optimal stopping control problem.
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Because there aren't a lot of people that use social,
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like dating apps, are on there for a long time.
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So the interesting aspect is like, all right,
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how long before you stop looking
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before it actually starts affecting your mind negatively,
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such that you see dating as a kind of,
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A kind of game versus an actual process
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of finding somebody that's going to make you happy
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for the rest of your life.
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That's really interesting.
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They have the data.
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I wish they would be able to release that data.
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And I do want to hop to it.
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It's OkCupid, right?
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I think they ran a huge, huge study on all of that.
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Yeah, they're more data driven, I think, OkCupid folks are.
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I think there's a lot of opportunity for dating apps,
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in general, even bigger than dating apps,
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people connecting on the internet.
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I just hope they're more data driven.
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And it doesn't seem that way.
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I think like, I've always thought that
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Goodreads should be a dating app.
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I've never used it.
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Goodreads is just lists like books that you've read.
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And allows you to comment on the books you read
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and what books you're currently reading.
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But it's a giant social networks of people reading books.
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And that seems to be a much better database
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of like interests.
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Of course it constrains you to the books you're reading,
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but like that really reveals so much more about the person.
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Allows you to discover shared interests
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because books are a kind of window
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into the way you see the world.
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Also like the kind of places,
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people you're curious about,
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the kind of ideas you're curious about.
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Are you a romantic or are you cold calculating rationalist?
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Are you into Ayn Rand or are you into Bernie Sanders?
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Are you into whatever?
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And I feel like that reveals so much more
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than like a person trying to look hot
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from a certain angle in a Tinder profile.
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Well, and it'd also be a really great filter
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in the first place for people.
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It's less people who read books
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and are willing to go and rate them
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and give feedback on them and so on.
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So that's already a really strong filter.
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Probably the type of people you'd be looking for.
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Well, at least be able to fake reading books.
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I mean, the thing about books,
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you don't really need to read it.
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You can just look at the click counts.
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Yeah, game the dating app by feigning intellectualism.
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Can I admit something very horrible about myself?
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The things that, you know,
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I don't have many things in my closet,
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but this is one of them.
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I've never actually read Shakespeare.
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I've only read Cliff Notes
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and I got a five in the AP English exam.
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The which books have I read?
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Oh yeah, which was the exam on which book?
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Oh no, they include a lot of them.
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But Hamlet, I don't even know
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if you read Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth.
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I don't remember, but I don't understand it.
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It's like really cryptic.
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It's really, I don't, and it's not that pleasant to read.
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It's like ancient speak.
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I don't understand it.
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Anyway, maybe I was too dumb.
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I'm still too dumb, but I did get...
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You got a five, which is...
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I don't know how the US grading system...
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Oh no, so AP English is a,
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there's kind of this advanced versions of courses
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in high school, and you take a test
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that is like a broad test for that subject
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and includes a lot.
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It wasn't obviously just Shakespeare.
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I think a lot of it was also writing, written.
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You have like AP Physics, AP Computer Science,
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AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and then AP English
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or AP Literature, I forget what it was.
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But I think Shakespeare was a part of that.
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And the point is you gamified it?
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Well, in entirety, I was into getting As.
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I saw it as a game.
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I don't think any...
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I don't think all of the learning I've done
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has been outside of school.
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The deepest learning I've done has been outside of school
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with a few exceptions, especially in grad school,
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like deep computer science courses.
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But that was still outside of school
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because it was outside of getting...
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It was outside of getting the A for the course.
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The best stuff I've ever done is when you read the chapter
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and you do many of the problems at the end of the chapter,
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which is usually not what's required for the course,
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like the hardest stuff.
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In fact, textbooks are freaking incredible.
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If you go back now and you look at like biology textbook
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or any of the computer science textbooks
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on algorithms and data structures,
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those things are incredibly...
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They have the best summary of a subject,
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plus they have practice problems of increasing difficulty
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that allows you to truly master the basic,
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like the fundamental ideas behind that.
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I got through my entire physics degree with one textbook
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that was just this really comprehensive one
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that they told us at the beginning of the first year,
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buy this, but you're gonna have to buy 15 other books
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for all your supplementary courses.
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And I was like, every time I was just checked
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to see whether this book covered it and it did.
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And I think I only bought like two or three extra
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and thank God, cause they're super expensive textbooks.
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It's a whole racket they've got going on.
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They could just...
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You get the right one, it's just like a manual for...
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But what's interesting though,
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is this is the tyranny of having exams and metrics.
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The tyranny of exams and metrics, yes.
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I loved them because I'm very competitive
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and I liked finding ways to gamify things
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and then like sort of dust off my shoulders afterwards
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when I get a good grade
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or be annoyed at myself when I didn't.
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But yeah, you're absolutely right.
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And that the actual...
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How much of that physics knowledge I've retained,
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like I've learned how to cram and study
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and please an examiner,
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but did that give me the deep lasting knowledge
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I mean, yes and no,
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but really like nothing makes you learn a topic better
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than when you actually then have to teach it yourself.
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Like I'm trying to wrap my teeth
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around this like game theory Moloch stuff right now.
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And there's no exam at the end of it that I can gamify.
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There's no way to gamify
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and sort of like shortcut my way through it.
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I have to understand it so deeply
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from like deep foundational levels
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to then to build upon it
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and then try and explain it to other people.
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And like, you're about to go and do some lectures, right?
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You can't sort of just like,
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you presumably can't rely on the knowledge
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that you got through when you were studying for an exam
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Yeah, and especially high level lectures,
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especially the kind of stuff you do on YouTube,
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you're not just regurgitating material.
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You have to think through what is the core idea here.
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And when you do the lectures live especially,
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you have to, there's no second takes.
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That is the luxury you get
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if you're recording a video for YouTube
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or something like that.
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But it definitely is a luxury you shouldn't lean on.
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I've gotten to interact with a few YouTubers
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that lean on that too much.
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And you realize, oh, you've gamified this system
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because you're not really thinking deeply about stuff.
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You're through the edit,
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both written and spoken,
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you're crafting an amazing video,
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but you yourself as a human being
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have not really deeply understood it.
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So live teaching or at least recording video
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with very few takes is a different beast.
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And I think it's the most honest way of doing it,
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like as few takes as possible.
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That's why I'm nervous about this.
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Don't go back and be like, ah, let's do that.
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Don't fuck this up, Liv.
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The tyranny of exams.
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I do think people talk about high school and college
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as a time to do drugs and drink and have fun
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and all this kind of stuff.
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But looking back, of course I did a lot of those things.
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Yes, no, yes, but it's also a time
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when you get to read textbooks or read books
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or learn with all the time in the world.
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You don't have these responsibilities of laundry
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and having to sort of pay for mortgage,
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all that kind of stuff, pay taxes, all this kind of stuff.
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In most cases, there's just so much time in the day
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for learning and you don't realize it at the time
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because at the time it seems like a chore,
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like why the hell does there's so much homework?
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But you never get a chance to do this kind of learning,
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this kind of homework ever again in life,
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unless later in life you really make a big effort out of it.
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Like basically your knowledge gets solidified.
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You don't get to have fun and learn.
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Learning is really fulfilling and really fun
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if you're that kind of person.
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Like some people like, you know,
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like knowledge is not something that they think is fun.
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But if that's the kind of thing that you think is fun,
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that's the time to have fun and do the drugs and drink
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and all that kind of stuff.
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But the learning, just going back to those textbooks,
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the hours spent with the textbooks
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is really, really rewarding.
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Do people even use textbooks anymore?
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Yeah. Do you think?
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Kids these days with their TikTok and their...
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Well, not even that, but it's just like so much information,
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really high quality information,
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you know, it's now in digital format online.
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Yeah, but they're not, they are using that,
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but you know, college is still very, there's a curriculum.
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I mean, so much of school is about rigorous study
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of a subject and still on YouTube, that's not there.
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Right. YouTube has,
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YouTube has, Grant Sanderson talks about this.
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Yeah, 3Blue1Brown.
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He says like, I'm not a math teacher.
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I just take really cool concepts and I inspire people.
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But if you wanna really learn calculus,
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if you wanna really learn linear algebra,
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you should do the textbook.
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You should do that, you know.
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And there's still the textbook industrial complex
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that like charges like $200 for textbook and somehow,
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I don't know, it's ridiculous.
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Well, they're like, oh, sorry, new edition, edition 14.6.
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Sorry, you can't use 14.5 anymore.
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It's like, what's different?
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We've got one paragraph different.
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So we mentioned offline, Daniel Negrano.
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I'm gonna get a chance to talk to him on this podcast.
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And he's somebody that I found fascinating
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in terms of the way he thinks about poker,
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verbalizes the way he thinks about poker,
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the way he plays poker.
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So, and he's still pretty damn good.
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He's been good for a long time.
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So you mentioned that people are running
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these kinds of simulations and the game of poker has changed.
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Do you think he's adapting in this way?
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Like the top pros, do they have to adopt this way?
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Or is there still like over the years,
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you basically develop this gut feeling about,
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like you get to be like good the way,
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like alpha zero is good.
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You look at the board and somehow from the fog
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comes out the right answer.
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Like this is likely what they have.
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This is likely the best way to move.
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And you don't really, you can't really put a finger
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on exactly why, but it just comes from your gut feeling.
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So gut feelings are definitely very important.
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You know, that we've got our two,
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you can distill it down to two modes
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of decision making, right?
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You've got your sort of logical linear voice in your head,
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system two, as it's often called,
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and your system one, your gut intuition.
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And historically in poker,
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the very best players were playing
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almost entirely by their gut.
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You know, often they do some kind of inspired play
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and you'd ask them why they do it
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and they wouldn't really be able to explain it.
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And that's not so much because their process
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was unintelligible, but it was more just because
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no one had the language with which to describe
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what optimal strategies were
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because no one really understood how poker worked.
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This was before, you know, we had analysis software.
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You know, no one was writing,
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I guess some people would write down their hands
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in a little notebook,
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but there was no way to assimilate all this data
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But then, you know, when computers became cheaper
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and software started emerging,
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and then obviously online poker,
link |
where it would like automatically save your hand histories.
link |
Now, all of a sudden you kind of had this body of data
link |
that you could run analysis on.
link |
And so that's when people started to see, you know,
link |
these mathematical solutions.
link |
And so what that meant is the role of intuition
link |
essentially became smaller.
link |
And it went more into, as we talked before about,
link |
you know, this game theory optimal style.
link |
But also, as I said, like game theory optimal
link |
is about loss minimization and being unexploitable.
link |
But if you're playing against people who aren't,
link |
because no person, no human being can play perfectly
link |
game theory optimal in poker, not even the best AIs.
link |
They're still like, you know,
link |
they're 99.99% of the way there or whatever,
link |
but it's kind of like the speed of light.
link |
You can't reach it perfectly.
link |
So there's still a role for intuition?
link |
Yes, so when, yeah,
link |
when you're playing this unexploitable style,
link |
but when your opponents start doing something,
link |
you know, suboptimal that you want to exploit,
link |
well, now that's where not only your like logical brain
link |
will need to be thinking, well, okay,
link |
I know I have this, I'm in the sort of top end
link |
of my range here with this hand.
link |
So that means I need to be calling X percent of the time
link |
and I put them on this range, et cetera.
link |
But then sometimes you'll have this gut feeling
link |
that will tell you, you know what, this time,
link |
I know mathematically I'm meant to call now.
link |
You know, I'm in the sort of top end of my range
link |
and this is the odds I'm getting.
link |
So the math says I should call,
link |
but there's something in your gut saying,
link |
they've got it this time, they've got it.
link |
Like they're beating you, your hand is worse.
link |
So then the real art,
link |
this is where the last remaining art in poker,
link |
the fuzziness is like, do you listen to your gut?
link |
How do you quantify the strength of it?
link |
Or can you even quantify the strength of it?
link |
And I think that's what Daniel has.
link |
I mean, I can't speak for how much he's studying
link |
with the simulators and that kind of thing.
link |
I think he has, like he must be to still be keeping up.
link |
But he has an incredible intuition for just,
link |
he's seen so many hands of poker in the flesh.
link |
He's seen so many people, the way they behave
link |
when the chips are, you know, when the money's on the line
link |
and he've got him staring you down in the eye.
link |
You know, he's intimidating.
link |
He's got this like kind of X factor vibe
link |
that he, you know, gives out.
link |
And he talks a lot, which is an interactive element,
link |
which is he's getting stuff from other people.
link |
And just like the subtlety.
link |
So he's like, he's probing constantly.
link |
Yeah, he's probing and he's getting this extra layer
link |
of information that others can't.
link |
Now that said though, he's good online as well.
link |
You know, I don't know how, again,
link |
would he be beating the top cash game players online?
link |
But when he's in person and he's got that additional
link |
layer of information, he can not only extract it,
link |
but he knows what to do with it still so well.
link |
There's one player who I would say is the exception
link |
And he's one of my favorite people to talk about
link |
in terms of, I think he might have cracked the simulation.
link |
It's Phil Helmuth.
link |
In more ways than one, he's cracked the simulation,
link |
Yeah, he somehow to this day is still
link |
and I love you Phil, I'm not in any way knocking you.
link |
He is still winning so much at the World Series
link |
of Poker specifically.
link |
He's now won 16 bracelets.
link |
The next nearest person I think has won 10.
link |
And he is consistently year in, year out going deep
link |
or winning these huge field tournaments,
link |
you know, with like 2000 people,
link |
which statistically he should not be doing.
link |
And yet you watch some of the plays he makes
link |
and they make no sense, like mathematically,
link |
they are so far from game theory optimal.
link |
And the thing is, if you went and stuck him
link |
in one of these high stakes cash games
link |
with a bunch of like GTO people,
link |
he's gonna get ripped apart.
link |
But there's something that he has that when he's
link |
in the halls of the World Series of Poker specifically,
link |
amongst sort of amateurish players,
link |
he gets them to do crazy shit like that.
link |
And, but my little pet theory is that also,
link |
he just, the card, he's like a wizard
link |
and he gets the cards to do what he needs them to.
link |
Because he just expects to win and he expects to receive,
link |
you know, to get flopper set with a frequency far beyond
link |
what the real percentages are.
link |
And I don't even know if he knows what the real percentages
link |
are, he doesn't need to, because he gets there.
link |
I think he has found the Chico,
link |
because when I've seen him play,
link |
he seems to be like annoyed that the long shot thing
link |
He's like annoyed and it's almost like everybody else
link |
is stupid because he was obviously going to win
link |
If that silly thing hadn't happened.
link |
And it's like, you don't understand,
link |
the silly thing happens 99% of the time.
link |
And it's a 1%, not the other way around,
link |
but genuinely for his lived experience at the World Series,
link |
only at the World Series of Poker, it is like that.
link |
So I don't blame him for feeling that way.
link |
But he does, he has this X factor
link |
and the poker community has tried for years
link |
to rip him down saying like, he's no good,
link |
but he's clearly good because he's still winning
link |
or there's something going on.
link |
Whether that's he's figured out how to mess
link |
with the fabric of reality and how cards,
link |
a randomly shuffled deck of cards come out.
link |
I don't know what it is, but he's doing it right still.
link |
Who do you think is the greatest of all time?
link |
Would you put Hellmuth?
link |
Not Hellmuth definitely, he seems like the kind of person
link |
when mentioned he would actually watch this.
link |
So you might wanna be careful.
link |
Well, as I said, I love Phil and I have,
link |
I would say this to his face, I'm not saying anything.
link |
I don't, he's got, he truly, I mean,
link |
he is one of the greatest.
link |
I don't know if he's the greatest,
link |
he's certainly the greatest at the World Series of Poker.
link |
And he is the greatest at, despite the game switching
link |
into a pure game, almost an entire game of math,
link |
he has managed to keep the magic alive.
link |
And this like, just through sheer force of will,
link |
making the game work for him.
link |
And that is incredible.
link |
And I think it's something that should be studied
link |
because it's an example.
link |
Yeah, there might be some actual game theoretic wisdom.
link |
There might be something to be said about optimality
link |
from studying him.
link |
What do you mean by optimality?
link |
Meaning, or rather game design, perhaps.
link |
Meaning if what he's doing is working,
link |
maybe poker is more complicated
link |
than the one we're currently modeling it as.
link |
So like his, yeah.
link |
Or there's an extra layer,
link |
and I don't mean to get too weird and wooey,
link |
but, or there's an extra layer of ability
link |
to manipulate the things the way you want them to go
link |
that we don't understand yet.
link |
Do you think Phil Hellmuth understands them?
link |
Is he just generally?
link |
Hashtag positivity.
link |
Well, he wrote a book on positivity and he's.
link |
He has, he did, not like a trolling book.
link |
He's just straight up, yeah.
link |
Phil Hellmuth wrote a book about positivity.
link |
And I think it's about sort of manifesting what you want
link |
and getting the outcomes that you want
link |
by believing so much in yourself
link |
and in your ability to win,
link |
like eyes on the prize.
link |
And I mean, it's working.
link |
The man's delivered.
link |
But where do you put like Phil Ivey
link |
and all those kinds of people?
link |
I mean, I'm too, I've been,
link |
to be honest too much out of the scene
link |
for the last few years to really,
link |
I mean, Phil Ivey's clearly got,
link |
again, he's got that X factor.
link |
He's so incredibly intimidating to play against.
link |
I've only played against him a couple of times,
link |
but when he like looks you in the eye
link |
and you're trying to run a bluff on him,
link |
oof, no one's made me sweat harder than Phil Ivey,
link |
just my bluff got through actually.
link |
That was actually one of the most thrilling moments
link |
I've ever had in poker was,
link |
it was in a Monte Carlo in a high roller.
link |
I can't remember exactly what the hand was,
link |
but I, you know, a three bit
link |
and then like just barreled all the way through.
link |
And he just like put his laser eyes into me.
link |
And I felt like he was just scouring my soul.
link |
And I was just like, hold it together, Liv,
link |
And he was like, folded.
link |
And you knew your hand was weaker.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I was bluffing.
link |
I presume, which, you know,
link |
there's a chance I was bluffing with the best hand,
link |
but I'm pretty sure my hand was worse.
link |
I was truly one of the deep highlights of my career.
link |
Did you show the cards or did you fold?
link |
You should never show in game.
link |
Like, because especially as I felt like
link |
I was one of the worst players at the table
link |
in that tournament.
link |
So giving that information,
link |
unless I had a really solid plan
link |
that I was now like advertising,
link |
oh, look, I'm capable of bluffing Phil Ivey.
link |
It's much more valuable to take advantage
link |
of the impression that they have of me,
link |
which is like, I'm a scared girl
link |
playing a high roller for the first time.
link |
Keep that going, you know.
link |
But isn't there layers to this?
link |
Like psychological warfare
link |
that the scared girl might be way smart
link |
and then like just to flip the tables?
link |
Do you think about that kind of stuff?
link |
Or is it better not to reveal information?
link |
I mean, generally speaking,
link |
you want to not reveal information.
link |
You know, the goal of poker is to be
link |
as deceptive as possible about your own strategies
link |
while elucidating as much out of your opponent
link |
So giving them free information,
link |
particularly if they're people
link |
who you consider very good players,
link |
any information I give them is going into
link |
their little database and being,
link |
I assume it's going to be calculated and used well.
link |
So I have to be really confident
link |
that my like meta gaming that I'm going to then do,
link |
oh, they've seen this, so therefore that.
link |
I'm going to be on the right level.
link |
So it's better just to keep that little secret
link |
to myself in the moment.
link |
So how much is bluffing part of the game?
link |
So yeah, I mean, maybe actually let me ask,
link |
like, what did it feel like with Phil Ivey
link |
or anyone else when it's a high stake,
link |
when it's a big, it's a big bluff?
link |
So a lot of money on the table and maybe,
link |
I mean, what defines a big bluff?
link |
Maybe a lot of money on the table,
link |
but also some uncertainty in your mind and heart
link |
about like self doubt.
link |
Well, maybe I miscalculated what's going on here,
link |
what the bet said, all that kind of stuff.
link |
Like, what does that feel like?
link |
I mean, it's, I imagine comparable to,
link |
you know, running a, I mean, any kind of big bluff
link |
where you have a lot of something
link |
that you care about on the line.
link |
You know, so if you're bluffing in a courtroom,
link |
not that anyone should ever do that,
link |
or, you know, something equatable to that.
link |
It's, you know, in that scenario, you know,
link |
I think it was the first time I'd ever played a 20,
link |
I'd won my way into this 25K tournament.
link |
So that was the buy in 25,000 euros.
link |
And I had satelliteed my way in
link |
because it was much bigger
link |
than I would ever normally play.
link |
And, you know, I hadn't, I wasn't that experienced
link |
at the time, and now I was sitting there
link |
against all the big boys, you know,
link |
the Negronus, the Phil Ivey's and so on.
link |
And then to like, you know,
link |
each time you put the bets out, you know,
link |
you put another bet out, your card.
link |
Yeah, I was on what's called a semi bluff.
link |
So there were some cards that could come
link |
that would make my hand very, very strong
link |
and therefore win.
link |
But most of the time, those cards don't come.
link |
So that is a semi bluff because you're representing,
link |
are you representing that you already have something?
link |
So I think in this scenario, I had a flush draw.
link |
So I had two clubs, two clubs came out on the flop.
link |
And then I'm hoping that on the turn
link |
and the river, one will come.
link |
So I have some future equity.
link |
I could hit a club and then I'll have the best hand
link |
in which case, great.
link |
And so I can keep betting and I'll want them to call,
link |
but I'm also got the other way of winning the hand
link |
where if my card doesn't come,
link |
I can keep betting and get them to fold their hand.
link |
And I'm pretty sure that's what the scenario was.
link |
So I had some future equity, but it's still, you know,
link |
most of the time I don't hit that club.
link |
And so I would rather him just fold because I'm, you know,
link |
the pot is now getting bigger and bigger.
link |
And in the end, like I've jam all in on the river.
link |
That's my entire tournament on the line.
link |
As far as I'm aware, this might be the one time
link |
I ever get to play a big 25K.
link |
You know, this was the first time I played one.
link |
So it was, it felt like the most momentous thing.
link |
And this was also when I was trying to build myself up at,
link |
you know, build my name, a name for myself in poker.
link |
I wanted to get respect.
link |
Destroy everything for you.
link |
It felt like it in the moment.
link |
Like, I mean, it literally does feel
link |
like a form of life and death.
link |
Like your body physiologically
link |
is having that flight or fight response.
link |
What are you doing with your body?
link |
What are you doing with your face?
link |
Are you just like, what are you thinking about?
link |
More of a mixture of like, okay, what are the cards?
link |
So in theory, I'm thinking about like, okay,
link |
what are cards that make my hand look stronger?
link |
Which cards hit my perceived range from his perspective?
link |
Which cards don't?
link |
What's the right amount of bet size
link |
to maximize my fold equity in this situation?
link |
You know, that's the logical stuff
link |
that I should be thinking about.
link |
But I think in reality, because I was so scared,
link |
because there's this, at least for me,
link |
there's a certain threshold of like nervousness or stress
link |
beyond which the logical brain shuts off.
link |
And now it just gets into this like,
link |
just like, it feels like a game of wits, basically.
link |
It's like of nerve.
link |
Can you hold your resolve?
link |
And it certainly got by that, like by the river.
link |
I think by that point, I was like,
link |
I don't even know if this is a good bluff anymore,
link |
but fuck it, let's do it.
link |
Your mind is almost numb from the intensity of that feeling.
link |
I call it the white noise.
link |
And it happens in all kinds of decision making.
link |
I think anything that's really, really stressful.
link |
I can imagine someone in like an important job interview,
link |
if it's like a job they've always wanted,
link |
and they're getting grilled, you know,
link |
like Bridgewater style, where they ask these really hard,
link |
like mathematical questions.
link |
You know, it's a really learned skill
link |
to be able to like subdue your flight or fight response.
link |
You know, I think get from the sympathetic
link |
into the parasympathetic.
link |
So you can actually, you know, engage that voice
link |
in your head and do those slow logical calculations.
link |
Because evolutionarily, you know, if we see a lion
link |
running at us, we didn't have time to sort of calculate
link |
the lion's kinetic energy and, you know,
link |
is it optimal to go this way or that way?
link |
You just react it.
link |
And physically, our bodies are well attuned
link |
to actually make right decisions.
link |
But when you're playing a game like poker,
link |
this is not something that you ever, you know,
link |
And yet you're in that same flight or fight response.
link |
And so that's a really important skill to be able to develop
link |
to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment
link |
and calm yourself so that you can think clearly.
link |
But as you were searching for a comparable thing,
link |
it's interesting because you just made me realize
link |
that bluffing is like an incredibly high stakes
link |
And I don't think you can.
link |
No, no, it's straight up lying.
link |
In the context of game, it's not a negative kind of lying.
link |
But it is, yeah, exactly.
link |
You're representing something that you don't have.
link |
And I was thinking like how often in life
link |
do we have such high stakes of lying?
link |
Because I was thinking certainly
link |
in high level military strategy,
link |
I was thinking when Hitler was lying to Stalin
link |
about his plans to invade the Soviet Union.
link |
And so you're talking to a person like your friends
link |
and you're fighting against the enemy,
link |
whatever the formulation of the enemy is.
link |
But meanwhile, whole time you're building up troops
link |
Wait, wait, so Hitler and Stalin were like
link |
pretending to be friends?
link |
Well, my history knowledge is terrible.
link |
Yeah, that they were, oh man.
link |
And it worked because Stalin,
link |
until the troops crossed the border
link |
and invaded in Operation Barbarossa
link |
where this storm of Nazi troops
link |
invaded large parts of the Soviet Union.
link |
And hence, one of the biggest wars in human history began.
link |
Stalin for sure thought that this was never going to be,
link |
that Hitler is not crazy enough to invade the Soviet Union.
link |
And it makes, geopolitically makes total sense
link |
to be collaborators.
link |
And ideologically, even though there's a tension
link |
between communism and fascism or national socialism,
link |
however you formulate it,
link |
it still feels like this is the right way
link |
to battle the West.
link |
They were more ideologically aligned.
link |
They in theory had a common enemy, which is the West.
link |
So it made total sense.
link |
And in terms of negotiations
link |
and the way things were communicated,
link |
it seemed to Stalin that for sure,
link |
that they would remain, at least for a while,
link |
peaceful collaborators.
link |
And that, and everybody, because of that,
link |
in the Soviet Union believed that it was a huge shock
link |
when Kiev was invaded.
link |
And you hear echoes of that when I travel to Ukraine,
link |
sort of the shock of the invasion.
link |
It's not just the invasion on one particular border,
link |
but the invasion of the capital city.
link |
And just like, holy shit, especially at that time,
link |
when you thought World War I,
link |
you realized that that was the war to end all wars.
link |
You would never have this kind of war.
link |
And holy shit, this person is mad enough
link |
to try to take on this monster in the Soviet Union.
link |
So it's no longer going to be a war
link |
of hundreds of thousands dead.
link |
It'll be a war of tens of millions dead.
link |
And yeah, but that, that's a very large scale kind of lie,
link |
but I'm sure there's in politics and geopolitics,
link |
that kind of lying happening all the time.
link |
And a lot of people pay financially
link |
and with their lives for that kind of lying.
link |
But in our personal lives, I don't know how often we,
link |
I think people do.
link |
I mean, like think of spouses
link |
cheating on their partners, right?
link |
And then like having to lie,
link |
like where were you last night?
link |
Stuff like that. Oh shit, that's tough.
link |
Yeah, that's true.
link |
Like that's, I think, you know, I mean,
link |
unfortunately that stuff happens all the time, right?
link |
Or having like multiple families, that one is great.
link |
When each family doesn't know about the other one
link |
and like maintaining that life.
link |
There's probably a sense of excitement about that too.
link |
Or. It seems unnecessary, yeah.
link |
Like, you know, the truth finds a way of coming out.
link |
But hence that's the thrill.
link |
I mean, you know, that's why I think actually like poker.
link |
What's so interesting about poker
link |
is most of the best players I know,
link |
they're always exceptions, you know?
link |
They're always bad eggs.
link |
But actually poker players are very honest people.
link |
I would say they are more honest than the average,
link |
you know, if you just took random population sample.
link |
Because A, you know, I think, you know,
link |
humans like to have that.
link |
Most people like to have some kind of, you know,
link |
mysterious, you know, an opportunity to do something
link |
like a little edgy.
link |
So we get to sort of scratch that itch
link |
of being edgy at the poker table,
link |
where it's like, it's part of the game.
link |
Everyone knows what they're in for, and that's allowed.
link |
And you get to like really get that out of your system.
link |
And then also like poker players learned that, you know,
link |
I would play in a huge game against some of my friends,
link |
even my partner, Igor, where we will be, you know,
link |
absolutely going at each other's throats,
link |
trying to draw blood in terms of winning each money
link |
off each other and like getting under each other's skin,
link |
winding each other up, doing the craftiest moves we can.
link |
But then once the game's done, you know,
link |
the winners and the losers will go off
link |
and get a drink together and have a fun time
link |
and like talk about it in this like weird academic way
link |
afterwards, because, and that's why games are so great.
link |
Cause you get to like live out like this competitive urge
link |
that, you know, most people have.
link |
What's it feel like to lose?
link |
Like we talked about bluffing when it worked out.
link |
What about when you, when you go broke?
link |
So like in a game, I'm, fortunately I've never gone broke.
link |
You mean like full life?
link |
I know plenty of people who have.
link |
And I don't think Igor would mind me saying he went,
link |
you know, he went broke once in poker bowl, you know,
link |
early on when we were together.
link |
I feel like you haven't lived unless you've gone broke.
link |
Some fundamental sense.
link |
I mean, I'm happy, I've sort of lived through it,
link |
vicariously through him when he did it at the time.
link |
But yeah, what's it like to lose?
link |
So it depends on the amount.
link |
It depends what percentage of your net worth
link |
It depends on your brain chemistry.
link |
It really, you know, varies from person to person.
link |
You have a very cold calculating way of thinking about this.
link |
So it depends what percentage.
link |
Well, it did, it really does, right?
link |
Yeah, it's true, it's true.
link |
I mean, that's another thing poker trains you to do.
link |
You see, you see everything in percentages
link |
or you see everything in like ROI or expected hourlies
link |
or cost benefit, et cetera.
link |
You know, so that's, one of the things I've tried to do
link |
is calibrate the strength of my emotional response
link |
to the win or loss that I've received.
link |
Because it's no good if you like, you know,
link |
you have a huge emotional dramatic response to a tiny loss
link |
or on the flip side, you have a huge win
link |
and you're sort of so dead inside
link |
that you don't even feel it.
link |
Well, that's, you know, that's a shame.
link |
I want my emotions to calibrate with reality
link |
as much as possible.
link |
So yeah, what's it like to lose?
link |
I mean, I've had times where I've lost, you know,
link |
busted out of a tournament that I thought I was gonna win in
link |
especially if I got really unlucky or I make a dumb play
link |
where I've gone away and like, you know, kicked the wall,
link |
punched a wall, I like nearly broke my hand one time.
link |
Like I'm a lot less competitive than I used to be.
link |
Like I was like pathologically competitive in my like
link |
late teens, early twenties, I just had to win at everything.
link |
And I think that sort of slowly waned as I've gotten older.
link |
According to you, yeah.
link |
I don't know if others would say the same, right?
link |
I feel like ultra competitive people,
link |
like I've heard Joe Rogan say this to me.
link |
It's like that he's a lot less competitive
link |
than he used to be.
link |
I don't know about that.
link |
No, I totally believe it.
link |
Like, because as you get, you can still be,
link |
like I care about winning.
link |
Like when, you know, I play a game with my buddies online
link |
or, you know, whatever it is,
link |
polytopia is my current obsession.
link |
Thank you for passing on your obsession to me.
link |
Are you playing now?
link |
Yeah, I'm playing now.
link |
We gotta have a game.
link |
But I'm terrible and I enjoy playing terribly.
link |
I don't wanna have a game because that's gonna pull me
link |
into your monster of like a competitive play.
link |
It's important, it's an important skill.
link |
I'm enjoying playing on the, I can't.
link |
You just do the points thing, you know, against the bots.
link |
Yeah, against the bots.
link |
And I can't even do the, there's like a hard one
link |
and there's a very hard one.
link |
And then it's crazy, yeah.
link |
I can't, I don't even enjoy the hard one.
link |
The crazy, I really don't enjoy.
link |
Cause it's intense.
link |
You have to constantly try to win
link |
as opposed to enjoy building a little world and.
link |
There's no time for exploration in polytopia.
link |
Well, when, once you graduate from the crazies,
link |
then you can come play the.
link |
Graduate from the crazies.
link |
Yeah, so in order to be able to play a decent game
link |
against like, you know, our group,
link |
you'll need to be, you'll need to be consistently winning
link |
like 90% of games against 15 crazy bots.
link |
And you'll be able to, like there'll be,
link |
I could teach you it within a day, honestly.
link |
How to beat the crazies?
link |
How to beat the crazies.
link |
And then, and then you'll be ready for the big leagues.
link |
Generalizes to more than just polytopia.
link |
But okay, why were we talking about polytopia?
link |
Losing hurts, oh yeah.
link |
Yes, competitiveness over time.
link |
I think it's more that, at least for me,
link |
I still care about playing,
link |
about winning when I choose to play something.
link |
It's just that I don't see the world
link |
as zero sum as I used to be, you know?
link |
I think as one gets older and wiser,
link |
you start to see the world more as a positive something.
link |
Or at least you're more aware of externalities,
link |
of scenarios, of competitive interactions.
link |
And so, yeah, I just like, I'm more,
link |
and I'm more aware of my own, you know, like,
link |
if I have a really strong emotional response to losing,
link |
and that makes me then feel shitty for the rest of the day,
link |
and then I beat myself up mentally for it.
link |
Like, I'm now more aware
link |
that that's unnecessary negative externality.
link |
So I'm like, okay, I need to find a way to turn this down,
link |
you know, dial this down a bit.
link |
Was poker the thing that has,
link |
if you think back at your life,
link |
and think about some of the lower points of your life,
link |
like the darker places you've got in your mind,
link |
did it have to do something with poker?
link |
Like, did losing spark the descent into darkness,
link |
or was it something else?
link |
I think my darkest points in poker
link |
were when I was wanting to quit and move on to other things,
link |
but I felt like I hadn't ticked all the boxes
link |
Like, I wanted to be the most winningest female player,
link |
which is by itself a bad goal.
link |
You know, that was one of my initial goals,
link |
and I was like, well, I haven't, you know,
link |
and I wanted to win a WPT event.
link |
I've won one of these, I've won one of these,
link |
but I want one of those as well.
link |
And that sort of, again, like,
link |
it's a drive of like overoptimization to random metrics
link |
that I decided were important
link |
without much wisdom at the time, but then like carried on.
link |
That made me continue chasing it longer
link |
than I still actually had the passion to chase it for.
link |
And I don't have any regrets that, you know,
link |
I played for as long as I did, because who knows,
link |
you know, I wouldn't be sitting here,
link |
I wouldn't be living this incredible life
link |
that I'm living now.
link |
This is the height of your life right now.
link |
This is it, peak experience, absolute pinnacle
link |
here in your robot land with your creepy light.
link |
No, it is, I mean, I wouldn't change a thing
link |
about my life right now, and I feel very blessed to say that.
link |
So, but the dark times were in the sort of like 2016 to 18,
link |
even sooner really, where I was like,
link |
I had stopped loving the game,
link |
and I was going through the motions,
link |
and I would, and then I was like, you know,
link |
I would take the losses harder than I needed to,
link |
because I'm like, ah, it's another one.
link |
And it was, I was aware that like,
link |
I felt like my life was ticking away,
link |
and I was like, is this gonna be what's on my tombstone?
link |
Oh yeah, she played the game of, you know,
link |
this zero sum game of poker,
link |
slightly more optimally than her next opponent.
link |
Like, cool, great, legacy, you know?
link |
So, I just wanted, you know, there was something in me
link |
that knew I needed to be doing something
link |
more directly impactful and just meaningful.
link |
It was just like your search for meaning,
link |
and I think it's a thing a lot of poker players,
link |
even a lot of, I imagine any games players
link |
who sort of love intellectual pursuits,
link |
you know, I think you should ask Magnus Carlsen
link |
this question, I don't know what he's on.
link |
He's walking away from chess, right?
link |
Yeah, like, it must be so hard for him.
link |
You know, he's been on the top for so long,
link |
and it's like, well, now what?
link |
He's got this incredible brain, like, what to put it to?
link |
It's this weird moment where I've just spoken with people
link |
that won multiple gold medals at the Olympics,
link |
and the depression hits hard after you win.
link |
Because it's a kind of a goodbye,
link |
saying goodbye to that person,
link |
to all the dreams you had that thought,
link |
you thought would give meaning to your life,
link |
but in fact, life is full of constant pursuits of meaning.
link |
It doesn't, you don't like arrive and figure it all out,
link |
and there's endless bliss,
link |
and it continues going on and on.
link |
You constantly have to figure out to rediscover yourself.
link |
And so for you, like that struggle to say goodbye to poker,
link |
you have to like find the next.
link |
There's always a bigger game.
link |
That's my motto is like, what's the next game?
link |
And more importantly,
link |
because obviously game usually implies zero sum,
link |
like what's a game which is like Omni win?
link |
Like what? Omni win.
link |
Why is Omni win so important?
link |
Because if everyone plays zero sum games,
link |
that's a fast track to either completely stagnate
link |
as a civilization, but more actually,
link |
far more likely to extinct ourselves.
link |
You know, like the playing field is finite.
link |
You know, nuclear powers are playing,
link |
you know, a game of poker with, you know,
link |
but their chips are nuclear weapons, right?
link |
And the stakes have gotten so large
link |
that if anyone makes a single bet, you know,
link |
fires some weapons, the playing field breaks.
link |
I made a video on this.
link |
Like, you know, the playing field is finite.
link |
And if we keep playing these adversarial zero sum games,
link |
thinking that we, you know,
link |
in order for us to win, someone else has to lose,
link |
or if we lose that, you know, someone else wins,
link |
that will extinct us.
link |
It's just a matter of when.
link |
What do you think about that mutually assured destruction,
link |
almost to the point of caricaturing game theory idea
link |
that does seem to be at the core
link |
of why we haven't blown each other up yet
link |
with nuclear weapons.
link |
Do you think there's some truth to that,
link |
this kind of stabilizing force
link |
of mutually assured destruction?
link |
And do you think that's gonna hold up
link |
through the 21st century?
link |
I mean, it has held.
link |
Yes, there's definitely truth to it,
link |
that it was a, you know, it's a Nash equilibrium.
link |
Yeah, are you surprised it held this long?
link |
It is crazy when you factor in all the like
link |
near miss accidental firings.
link |
Yes, that's makes me wonder like, you know,
link |
are you familiar with the like quantum suicide
link |
thought experiment, where it's basically like,
link |
you have a, you know, like a Russian roulette
link |
type scenario hooked up to some kind of quantum event,
link |
you know, particle splitting or pair of particles splitting.
link |
And if it, you know, if it goes A,
link |
then the gun doesn't go off and it goes B,
link |
then it does go off and it kills you.
link |
Because you can only ever be in the universe,
link |
you know, assuming like the Everett branch,
link |
you know, multiverse theory,
link |
you'll always only end up in the branch
link |
where you continually make, you know, option A comes in,
link |
but you run that experiment enough times,
link |
it starts getting pretty damn, you know,
link |
out of the tree gets huge,
link |
there's a million different scenarios,
link |
but you'll always find yourself in this,
link |
in the one where it didn't go off.
link |
And so from that perspective, you are essentially immortal
link |
because someone, and you will only find yourself
link |
in the set of observers that make it down that path.
link |
So it's kind of a...
link |
That doesn't mean, that doesn't mean
link |
you're still not gonna be fucked at some point in your life.
link |
No, of course not, no, I'm not advocating
link |
like that we're all immortal because of this.
link |
It's just like a fun thought experiment.
link |
And the point is it like raises this thing
link |
of like these things called observer selection effects,
link |
which Bostrom, Nick Bostrom talks about a lot,
link |
and I think people should go read.
link |
It's really powerful,
link |
but I think it could be overextended, that logic.
link |
I'm not sure exactly how it can be.
link |
I just feel like you can get, you can overgeneralize
link |
that logic somehow.
link |
Well, no, I mean, it leaves you into like solipsism,
link |
which is a very dangerous mindset.
link |
Again, if everyone like falls into solipsism of like,
link |
well, I'll be fine.
link |
That's a great way of creating a very,
link |
self terminating environment.
link |
But my point is, is that with the nuclear weapons thing,
link |
there have been at least, I think it's 12 or 11 near misses
link |
of like just stupid things, like there was moonrise
link |
over Norway, and it made weird reflections
link |
of some glaciers in the mountains, which set off,
link |
I think the alarms of NORAD radar,
link |
and that put them on high alert, nearly ready to shoot.
link |
And it was only because the head of Russian military
link |
happened to be at the UN in New York at the time
link |
that they go like, well, wait a second,
link |
why would they fire now when their guy is there?
link |
And it was only that lucky happenstance,
link |
which doesn't happen very often where they didn't then
link |
escalate it into firing.
link |
And there's a bunch of these different ones.
link |
Stanislav Petrov, like saved the person
link |
who should be the most famous person on earth,
link |
cause he's probably on expectation,
link |
saved the most human lives of anyone,
link |
like billions of people by ignoring Russian orders to fire
link |
because he felt in his gut that actually
link |
this was a false alarm.
link |
And it turned out to be, you know, very hard thing to do.
link |
And there's so many of those scenarios that I can't help
link |
but wonder at this point that we aren't having this kind
link |
of like selection effect thing going on.
link |
Cause you look back and you're like, geez,
link |
that's a lot of near misses.
link |
But of course we don't know the actual probabilities
link |
that they would have lent each one would have ended up
link |
Maybe they were not that likely, but still the point is,
link |
it's a very dark, stupid game that we're playing.
link |
And it is an absolute moral imperative if you ask me
link |
to get as many people thinking about ways
link |
to make this like very precarious.
link |
Cause we're in a Nash equilibrium,
link |
but it's not like we're in the bottom of a pit.
link |
You know, if you would like map it topographically,
link |
it's not like a stable ball at the bottom of a thing.
link |
We're not in equilibrium because of that.
link |
We're on the top of a hill with a ball balanced on top.
link |
And just at any little nudge could send it flying down
link |
and you know, nuclear war pops off
link |
and hellfire and bad times.
link |
On the positive side,
link |
life on earth will probably still continue.
link |
And another intelligent civilization might still pop up.
link |
Several millennia after.
link |
Pick your X risk, depends on the X risk.
link |
Nuclear war, sure.
link |
That's one of the perhaps less bad ones.
link |
Green goo through synthetic biology, very bad.
link |
Will turn, you know, destroy all, you know,
link |
organic matter through, you know,
link |
it's basically like a biological paperclip maximizer.
link |
Or AI type, you know, mass extinction thing as well
link |
would also be bad.
link |
Shh, they're listening.
link |
There's a robot right behind you.
link |
So let me ask you about this from a game theory perspective.
link |
Do you think we're living in a simulation?
link |
Do you think we're living inside a video game
link |
created by somebody else?
link |
Well, so what was the second part of the question?
link |
Do I think we're living in a simulation and?
link |
A simulation that is observed by somebody
link |
for purpose of entertainment.
link |
So like a video game.
link |
Are we, because there's a,
link |
it's like Phil Hellmuth type of situation, right?
link |
Like there's a creepy level of like,
link |
this is kind of fun and interesting.
link |
Like there's a lot of interesting stuff going on.
link |
Maybe that could be somehow integrated
link |
into the evolutionary process where the way we perceive
link |
Are you asking me if I believe in God?
link |
Kind of, but God seems to be not optimizing
link |
in the different formulations of God that we conceive of.
link |
He doesn't seem to be, or she, optimizing
link |
for like personal entertainment.
link |
Maybe the older gods did.
link |
But the, you know, just like, basically like a teenager
link |
in their mom's basement watching, create a fun universe
link |
to observe what kind of crazy shit might happen.
link |
Okay, so to try and answer this.
link |
Do I think there is some kind of extraneous intelligence
link |
to like our, you know, classic measurable universe
link |
that we, you know, can measure with, you know,
link |
through our current physics and instruments?
link |
Partly because I've had just small little bits of evidence
link |
in my own life, which have made me question.
link |
Like, so I was a diehard atheist, even five years ago.
link |
You know, I got into like the rationality community,
link |
big fan of less wrong, continue to be an incredible resource.
link |
But I've just started to have too many little snippets
link |
of experience, which don't make sense with the current sort
link |
of purely materialistic explanation of how reality works.
link |
Isn't that just like a humbling, practical realization
link |
that we don't know how reality works?
link |
Isn't that just a reminder to yourself that you're
link |
like, I don't know how reality works, isn't that just
link |
a reminder to yourself?
link |
Yeah, no, it's a reminder of epistemic humility
link |
because I fell too hard, you know, same as people,
link |
like I think, you know, many people who are just like,
link |
my religion is the way, this is the correct way,
link |
this is the work, this is the law, you are immoral
link |
if you don't follow this, blah, blah, blah.
link |
I think they are lacking epistemic humility.
link |
They're a little too much hubris there.
link |
But similarly, I think that sort of the Richard Dawkins
link |
realism is too rigid as well and doesn't, you know,
link |
there's a way to try and navigate these questions
link |
which still honors the scientific method,
link |
which I still think is our best sort of realm
link |
of like reasonable inquiry, you know, a method of inquiry.
link |
So an example, two kind of notable examples
link |
that like really rattled my cage.
link |
The first one was actually in 2010 early on
link |
in quite early on in my poker career.
link |
And I, remember the Icelandic volcano that erupted
link |
that like shut down kind of all Atlantic airspace.
link |
And it meant I got stuck down in the South of France.
link |
I was there for something else.
link |
And I couldn't get home and someone said,
link |
well, there's a big poker tournament happening in Italy.
link |
Maybe, do you wanna go?
link |
I was like, all right, sure.
link |
Like, let's, you know, got a train across,
link |
found a way to get there.
link |
And the buy in was 5,000 euros,
link |
which was much bigger than my bankroll would normally allow.
link |
And so I played a feeder tournament, won my way in
link |
kind of like I did with the Monte Carlo big one.
link |
So then I won my way, you know,
link |
from 500 euros into 5,000 euros to play this thing.
link |
And on day one of then the big tournament,
link |
which turned out to have,
link |
it was the biggest tournament ever held in Europe
link |
It got over like 1,200 people, absolutely huge.
link |
And I remember they dimmed the lights for before, you know,
link |
the normal shuffle up and deal
link |
to tell everyone to start playing.
link |
And they played Chemical Brothers, Hey Boy, Hey Girl,
link |
which I don't know why it's notable,
link |
but it was just like a really,
link |
it was a song I always liked.
link |
It was like one of these like pump me up songs.
link |
And I was sitting there thinking, oh yeah, it's exciting.
link |
I'm playing this really big tournament.
link |
And out of nowhere, just suddenly this voice in my head,
link |
just, and it sounded like my own sort of, you know,
link |
when you think in your mind, you hear a voice kind of, right?
link |
And so it sounded like my own voice and it said,
link |
you are going to win this tournament.
link |
And it was so powerful that I got this like wave of like,
link |
you know, sort of goosebumps down my body.
link |
And that I even, I remember looking around being like,
link |
did anyone else hear that?
link |
And obviously people are in their phones,
link |
like no one else heard it.
link |
And I was like, okay, six days later,
link |
I win the fucking tournament out of 1,200 people.
link |
And I don't know how to explain it.
link |
Okay, yes, maybe I have that feeling
link |
before every time I play.
link |
And it's just that I happened to, you know,
link |
because I won the tournament, I retroactively remembered it.
link |
Or the feeling gave you a kind of,
link |
now from the film, Helmutian.
link |
Like it gave you a confident, a deep confidence.
link |
It definitely did.
link |
Like, I remember then feeling this like sort of,
link |
well, although I remember then on day one,
link |
I then went and lost half my stack quite early on.
link |
And I remember thinking like, oh, well, that was bullshit.
link |
You know, what kind of premonition is this?
link |
Thinking, oh, I'm out.
link |
But you know, I managed to like keep it together
link |
and recover and then just went like pretty perfectly
link |
And either way, it definitely instilled me
link |
with this confidence.
link |
And I don't want to put, I can't put an explanation.
link |
Like, you know, was it some, you know, huge extra to extra,
link |
you know, supernatural thing driving me?
link |
Or was it just my own self confidence in someone
link |
that just made me make the right decisions?
link |
And I don't, I'm not going to put a frame on it.
link |
I think I know a good explanation.
link |
So we're a bunch of NPCs living in this world
link |
created by, in the simulation.
link |
And then people, not people, creatures from outside
link |
of the simulation sort of can tune in
link |
and play your character.
link |
And that feeling you got is somebody just like,
link |
they got to play a poker tournament through you.
link |
Honestly, it felt like that.
link |
It did actually feel a little bit like that.
link |
But it's been 12 years now.
link |
I've retold the story many times.
link |
Like, I don't even know how much I can trust my memory.
link |
You're just an NPC retelling the same story.
link |
Because they just played the tournament and left.
link |
Yeah, they're like, oh, that was fun.
link |
And now you're for the rest of your life left
link |
as a boring NPC retelling this story of greatness.
link |
But it was, and what was interesting was that after that,
link |
then I didn't obviously win a major tournament
link |
for quite a long time.
link |
And it left, that was actually another sort of dark period
link |
because I had this incredible,
link |
like the highs of winning that,
link |
just on a like material level were insane,
link |
winning the money.
link |
I was on the front page of newspapers
link |
because there was like this girl that came out of nowhere
link |
and won this big thing.
link |
And so again, like sort of chasing that feeling
link |
But then on top of that, there was this feeling
link |
of like almost being touched by something bigger
link |
that was like, ah.
link |
So maybe, did you have a sense
link |
that I might be somebody special?
link |
Like this kind of,
link |
I think that's the confidence thing
link |
that maybe you could do something special in this world
link |
after all kind of feeling.
link |
I definitely, I mean, this is the thing
link |
I think everybody wrestles with to an extent, right?
link |
We are truly the protagonists in our own lives.
link |
And so it's a natural bias, human bias
link |
And I think, and in some ways we are special.
link |
Every single person is special
link |
because you are that, the universe does,
link |
the world literally does revolve around you.
link |
That's the thing in some respect.
link |
But of course, if you then zoom out
link |
and take the amalgam of everyone's experiences,
link |
then no, it doesn't.
link |
So there is this shared sort of objective reality,
link |
but sorry, there's objective reality that is shared,
link |
but then there's also this subjective reality
link |
which is truly unique to you.
link |
And I think both of those things coexist.
link |
And it's not like one is correct and one isn't.
link |
And again, anyone who's like,
link |
oh no, your lived experience is everything
link |
versus your lived experience is nothing.
link |
No, it's a blend between these two things.
link |
They can exist concurrently.
link |
But there's a certain kind of sense
link |
that at least I've had my whole life.
link |
And I think a lot of people have this as like,
link |
well, I'm just like this little person.
link |
Surely I can't be one of those people
link |
that do the big thing, right?
link |
There's all these big people doing big things.
link |
There's big actors and actresses, big musicians.
link |
There's big business owners and all that kind of stuff,
link |
scientists and so on.
link |
I have my own subject experience that I enjoy and so on,
link |
but there's like a different layer.
link |
Like surely I can't do those great things.
link |
I mean, one of the things just having interacted
link |
with a lot of great people, I realized,
link |
no, they're like just the same humans as me.
link |
And that realization I think is really empowering.
link |
And to remind yourself.
link |
Well, in terms of.
link |
Depends on some, yeah.
link |
They're like a bag of insecurities and.
link |
Peculiar sort of, like their own little weirdnesses
link |
and so on, I should say also not.
link |
They have the capacity for brilliance,
link |
but they're not generically brilliant.
link |
Like, you know, we tend to say this person
link |
or that person is brilliant, but really no,
link |
they're just like sitting there and thinking through stuff
link |
just like the rest of us.
link |
I think they're in the habit of thinking through stuff
link |
seriously and they've built up a habit of not allowing them,
link |
their mind to get trapped in a bunch of bullshit
link |
and minutia of day to day life.
link |
They really think big ideas, but those big ideas,
link |
it's like allowing yourself the freedom to think big,
link |
to realize that you can be one that actually solved
link |
this particular big problem.
link |
First identify a big problem that you care about,
link |
then like, I can actually be the one
link |
that solves this problem.
link |
And like allowing yourself to believe that.
link |
And I think sometimes you do need to have like
link |
that shock go through your body and a voice tells you,
link |
you're gonna win this tournament.
link |
And whether it was, it's this idea of useful fictions.
link |
So again, like going through all like
link |
the classic rationalist training of Les Wrong
link |
where it's like, you want your map,
link |
you know, the image you have of the world in your head
link |
to as accurately match up with how the world actually is.
link |
You want the map and the territory to perfectly align
link |
as, you know, you want it to be
link |
as an accurate representation as possible.
link |
I don't know if I fully subscribed to that anymore,
link |
having now had these moments of like feeling of something
link |
either bigger or just actually just being overconfident.
link |
Like there is value in overconfidence sometimes.
link |
If you, you know, take, you know,
link |
take Magnus Carlsen, right?
link |
If he, I'm sure from a young age,
link |
he knew he was very talented,
link |
but I wouldn't be surprised if he was also had something
link |
in him to, well, actually maybe he's a bad example
link |
because he truly is the world's greatest,
link |
but someone who it was unclear
link |
whether they were gonna be the world's greatest,
link |
but ended up doing extremely well
link |
because they had this innate, deep self confidence,
link |
this like even overblown idea
link |
of how good their relative skill level is.
link |
That gave them the confidence to then pursue this thing
link |
and they're like with the kind of focus and dedication
link |
that it requires to excel in whatever it is
link |
you're trying to do, you know?
link |
And so there are these useful fictions
link |
and that's where I think I diverge slightly
link |
with the classic sort of rationalist community
link |
because that's a field that is worth studying
link |
of like how the stories we tell,
link |
what the stories we tell to ourselves,
link |
even if they are actually false,
link |
and even if we suspect they might be false,
link |
how it's better to sort of have that like little bit
link |
of faith, like value in faith, I think actually.
link |
And that's partly another thing
link |
that's now led me to explore the concept of God,
link |
whether you wanna call it a simulator,
link |
the classic theological thing.
link |
I think we're all like elucidating to the same thing.
link |
Now, I don't know, I'm not saying,
link |
because obviously the Christian God
link |
is like all benevolent, endless love.
link |
The simulation, at least one of the simulation hypothesis
link |
is like, as you said, like a teenager in his bedroom
link |
who doesn't really care, doesn't give a shit
link |
about the individuals within there.
link |
It just like wants to see how the thing plays out
link |
because it's curious and it could turn it off like that.
link |
Where on the sort of psychopathy
link |
to benevolent spectrum God is, I don't know.
link |
But just having a little bit of faith
link |
that there is something else out there
link |
that might be interested in our outcome
link |
is I think an essential thing actually for people to find.
link |
A, because it creates commonality between,
link |
it's something we can all share.
link |
And it is uniquely humbling of all of us to an extent.
link |
It's like a common objective.
link |
But B, it gives people that little bit of like reserve
link |
when things get really dark.
link |
And I do think things are gonna get pretty dark
link |
over the next few years.
link |
But it gives that like,
link |
to think that there's something out there
link |
that actually wants our game to keep going.
link |
I keep calling it the game.
link |
It's a thing C and I, we call it the game.
link |
You and C is a.k.a. Grimes, we call what the game?
link |
Everything, the whole thing?
link |
Yeah, we joke about like.
link |
So everything is a game.
link |
Well, the universe, like what if it's a game
link |
and the goal of the game is to figure out like,
link |
well, either how to beat it, how to get out of it.
link |
Maybe this universe is an escape room,
link |
like a giant escape room.
link |
And the goal is to figure out,
link |
put all the pieces to puzzle, figure out how it works
link |
in order to like unlock this like hyperdimensional key
link |
and get out beyond what it is.
link |
No, but then, so you're saying it's like different levels
link |
and it's like a cage within a cage within a cage
link |
and never like one cage at a time,
link |
you figure out how to escape that.
link |
Like a new level up, you know,
link |
like us becoming multi planetary would be a level up
link |
or us, you know, figuring out how to upload
link |
our consciousnesses to the thing.
link |
That would probably be a leveling up or spiritually,
link |
you know, humanity becoming more combined
link |
and less adversarial and bloodthirsty
link |
and us becoming a little bit more enlightened.
link |
That would be a leveling up.
link |
You know, there's many different frames to it,
link |
whether it's physical, you know, digital
link |
or like metaphysical.
link |
I wonder what the levels, I think,
link |
I think level one for earth is probably
link |
the biological evolutionary process.
link |
So going from single cell organisms to early humans.
link |
Then maybe level two is whatever's happening inside our minds
link |
and creating ideas and creating technologies.
link |
That's like evolutionary process of ideas.
link |
And then multi planetary is interesting.
link |
Is that fundamentally different
link |
from what we're doing here on earth?
link |
Probably, because it allows us to like exponentially scale.
link |
It delays the Malthusian trap, right?
link |
It's a way to keep the playing field,
link |
to make the playing field get larger
link |
so that it can accommodate more of our stuff, more of us.
link |
And that's a good thing,
link |
but I don't know if it like fully solves this issue of,
link |
well, this thing called Moloch,
link |
which we haven't talked about yet,
link |
but which is basically,
link |
I call it the God of unhealthy competition.
link |
Yeah, let's go to Moloch.
link |
You did a great video on Moloch and one aspect of it,
link |
the application of it to one aspect.
link |
Instagram beauty filters.
link |
Very niche, but I wanted to start off small.
link |
So Moloch was originally coined as,
link |
well, so apparently back in the like Canaanite times,
link |
it was to say ancient Carthaginian,
link |
I can never say it Carthaginian,
link |
somewhere around like 300 BC or 280, I don't know.
link |
There was supposedly this death cult
link |
who would sacrifice their children
link |
to this awful demon God thing they called Moloch
link |
in order to get power to win wars.
link |
So really dark, horrible things.
link |
And it was literally like about child sacrifice,
link |
whether they actually existed or not, we don't know,
link |
but in mythology they did.
link |
And this God that they worshiped
link |
was this thing called Moloch.
link |
And then I don't know,
link |
it seemed like it was kind of quiet throughout history
link |
in terms of mythology beyond that,
link |
until this movie Metropolis in 1927 talked about this,
link |
you see that there was this incredible futuristic city
link |
that everyone was living great in,
link |
but then the protagonist goes underground into the sewers
link |
and sees that the city is run by this machine.
link |
And this machine basically would just like kill the workers
link |
all the time because it was just so hard to keep it running.
link |
They were always dying.
link |
So there was all this suffering that was required
link |
in order to keep the city going.
link |
And then the protagonist has this vision
link |
that this machine is actually this demon Moloch.
link |
So again, it's like this sort of like mechanistic consumption
link |
of humans in order to get more power.
link |
And then Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in the 60s,
link |
which incredible poem called Howl about this thing Moloch.
link |
And a lot of people sort of quite understandably
link |
take the interpretation of that,
link |
that he's talking about capitalism.
link |
But then the sort of piece to resistance
link |
that's moved Moloch into this idea of game theory
link |
was Scott Alexander of Slate Style Codex
link |
wrote this incredible,
link |
well, literally I think it might be my favorite piece
link |
of writing of all time.
link |
It's called Meditations on Moloch.
link |
Everyone must go read it.
link |
I say Codex is a blog.
link |
We can link to it in the show notes or something, right?
link |
But I like how you assume
link |
I have a professional operation going on here.
link |
I shall try to remember to...
link |
You were gonna assume.
link |
What are you, what do you want?
link |
You're giving the impression of it.
link |
Yeah, I'll look, please.
link |
If I don't, please somebody in the comments remind me.
link |
If you don't know this blog,
link |
it's one of the best blogs ever probably.
link |
You should probably be following it.
link |
Are blogs still a thing?
link |
I think they are still a thing, yeah.
link |
Yeah, he's migrated onto Substack,
link |
but yeah, it's still a blog.
link |
Substack better not fuck things up, but...
link |
I hope they don't, I hope they don't turn Molochy,
link |
which will mean something to people when we continue.
link |
When I stop interrupting for once.
link |
No, no, it's good.
link |
So anyway, so he writes,
link |
he writes this piece, Meditations on Moloch,
link |
and basically he analyzes the poem and he's like,
link |
okay, so it seems to be something relating
link |
to where competition goes wrong.
link |
And, you know, Moloch was historically this thing
link |
of like where people would sacrifice a thing
link |
that they care about, in this case, children,
link |
their own children, in order to gain power,
link |
a competitive advantage.
link |
And if you look at almost everything that sort of goes wrong
link |
in our society, it's that same process.
link |
So with the Instagram beauty filters thing,
link |
you know, if you're trying to become
link |
a famous Instagram model,
link |
you are incentivized to post the hottest pictures
link |
of yourself that you can, you know,
link |
you're trying to play that game.
link |
There's a lot of hot women on Instagram.
link |
How do you compete against them?
link |
You post really hot pictures
link |
and that's how you get more likes.
link |
As technology gets better, you know,
link |
more makeup techniques come along.
link |
And then more recently, these beauty filters
link |
where like at the touch of a button,
link |
it makes your face look absolutely incredible
link |
compared to your natural face.
link |
These technologies come along,
link |
it's everyone is incentivized to that short term strategy.
link |
But over on net, it's bad for everyone
link |
because now everyone is kind of feeling
link |
like they have to use these things.
link |
And these things like they make you like,
link |
the reason why I talked about them in this video
link |
is because I noticed it myself, you know,
link |
like I was trying to grow my Instagram for a while,
link |
I've given up on it now.
link |
But yeah, and I noticed these filters,
link |
how good they made me look.
link |
And I'm like, well, I know that everyone else
link |
is kind of doing it.
link |
Go subscribe to Liv's Instagram.
link |
Please, so I don't have to use the filters.
link |
I'll post a bunch of, yeah, make it blow up.
link |
So yeah, you felt the pressure actually.
link |
Exactly, these short term incentives
link |
to do this like, this thing that like either sacrifices
link |
your integrity or something else
link |
in order to like stay competitive,
link |
which on aggregate turns like,
link |
creates this like sort of race to the bottom spiral
link |
where everyone else ends up in a situation
link |
which is worse off than if they hadn't started,
link |
you know, than they were before.
link |
Kind of like if, like at a football stadium,
link |
like the system is so badly designed,
link |
a competitive system of like everyone sitting
link |
and having a view that if someone at the very front
link |
stands up to get an even better view,
link |
it forces everyone else behind
link |
to like adopt that same strategy
link |
just to get to where they were before.
link |
But now everyone's stuck standing up.
link |
Like, so you need this like top down God's eye coordination
link |
to make it go back to the better state.
link |
But from within the system, you can't actually do that.
link |
So that's kind of what this Moloch thing is.
link |
It's this thing that makes people sacrifice values
link |
in order to optimize for the winning the game in question,
link |
the short term game.
link |
But this Moloch, can you attribute it
link |
to any one centralized source
link |
or is it an emergent phenomena
link |
from a large collection of people?
link |
It's an emergent phenomena.
link |
It's a force of game theory.
link |
It's a force of bad incentives on a multi agent system
link |
where you've got more, you know,
link |
prisoner's dilemma is technically
link |
a kind of Moloch system as well,
link |
but it's just a two player thing.
link |
But another word for Moloch is it multipolar trap.
link |
Where basically you just got a lot of different people
link |
all competing for some kind of prize.
link |
And it would be better
link |
if everyone didn't do this one shitty strategy,
link |
but because that strategy gives you a short term advantage,
link |
everyone's incentivized to do it.
link |
And so everyone ends up doing it.
link |
So the responsibility for,
link |
I mean, social media is a really nice place
link |
for a large number of people to play game theory.
link |
And so they also have the ability
link |
to then design the rules of the game.
link |
And is it on them to try to anticipate
link |
what kind of like to do the thing
link |
that poker players are doing to run simulation?
link |
Ideally that would have been great.
link |
If, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack
link |
and all the, you know, the Twitter founders and everyone,
link |
if they had at least just run a few simulations
link |
of how their algorithms would, you know,
link |
if different types of algorithms would turn out for society,
link |
that would have been great.
link |
That's really difficult to do
link |
that kind of deep philosophical thinking
link |
about thinking about humanity actually.
link |
So not kind of this level of how do we optimize engagement
link |
or what brings people joy in the short term,
link |
but how is this thing going to change
link |
the way people see the world?
link |
How is it gonna get morphed in iterative games played
link |
into something that will change society forever?
link |
That requires some deep thinking.
link |
That's, I hope there's meetings like that inside companies,
link |
but I haven't seen them.
link |
There aren't, that's the problem.
link |
And it's difficult because like,
link |
when you're starting up a social media company,
link |
you know, you're aware that you've got investors to please,
link |
there's bills to pay, you know,
link |
there's only so much R&D you can afford to do.
link |
You've got all these like incredible pressures,
link |
bad incentives to get on and just build your thing
link |
as quickly as possible and start making money.
link |
And, you know, I don't think anyone intended
link |
when they built these social media platforms
link |
and just to like preface it.
link |
So the reason why, you know, social media is relevant
link |
because it's a very good example of like,
link |
everyone these days is optimizing for, you know, clicks,
link |
whether it's a social media platforms themselves,
link |
because, you know, every click gets more, you know,
link |
impressions and impressions pay for, you know,
link |
they get advertising dollars
link |
or whether it's individual influencers
link |
or, you know, whether it's a New York Times or whoever,
link |
they're trying to get their story to go viral.
link |
So everyone's got this bad incentive of using, you know,
link |
as you called it, the clickbait industrial complex.
link |
That's a very molly key system
link |
because everyone is now using worse and worse tactics
link |
in order to like try and win this attention game.
link |
And yeah, so ideally these companies
link |
would have had enough slack in the beginning
link |
in order to run these experiments to see,
link |
okay, what are the ways this could possibly go wrong
link |
What are the ways that Moloch,
link |
they should be aware of this concept of Moloch
link |
and realize that whenever you have
link |
a highly competitive multiagent system,
link |
which social media is a classic example of,
link |
millions of agents all trying to compete
link |
for likes and so on,
link |
and you try and bring all this complexity down
link |
into like very small metrics,
link |
such as number of likes, number of retweets,
link |
whatever the algorithm optimizes for,
link |
that is a guaranteed recipe for this stuff to go wrong
link |
and become a race to the bottom.
link |
I think there should be an honesty when founders,
link |
I think there's a hunger for that kind of transparency
link |
of like, we don't know what the fuck we're doing.
link |
This is a fascinating experiment.
link |
We're all running as a human civilization.
link |
Let's try this out.
link |
And like, actually just be honest about this,
link |
that we're all like these weird rats in a maze.
link |
None of us are controlling it.
link |
There's this kind of sense like the founders,
link |
the CEO of Instagram or whatever,
link |
Mark Zuckerberg has a control and he's like,
link |
like with strings playing people.
link |
He's at the mercy of this is like everyone else.
link |
He's just like trying to do his best.
link |
And like, I think putting on a smile
link |
and doing over polished videos
link |
about how Instagram and Facebook are good for you,
link |
I think is not the right way to actually ask
link |
some of the deepest questions we get to ask as a society.
link |
How do we design the game such that we build a better world?
link |
I think a big part of this as well is people,
link |
there's this philosophy, particularly in Silicon Valley
link |
of well, techno optimism,
link |
technology will solve all our issues.
link |
And there's a steel man argument to that where yes,
link |
technology has solved a lot of problems
link |
and can potentially solve a lot of future ones.
link |
But it can also, it's always a double edged sword.
link |
And particularly as you know,
link |
technology gets more and more powerful
link |
and we've now got like big data
link |
and we're able to do all kinds of like
link |
psychological manipulation with it and so on.
link |
Technology is not a values neutral thing.
link |
People think, I used to always think this myself.
link |
It's like this naive view that,
link |
oh, technology is completely neutral.
link |
It's just, it's the humans that either make it good or bad.
link |
No, to the point we're at now,
link |
the technology that we are creating,
link |
they are social technologies.
link |
They literally dictate how humans now form social groups
link |
and so on beyond that.
link |
And beyond that, it also then,
link |
that gives rise to like the memes
link |
that we then like coalesce around.
link |
And that, if you have the stack that way
link |
where it's technology driving social interaction,
link |
which then drives like memetic culture
link |
and like which ideas become popular, that's Moloch.
link |
And we need the other way around, we need it.
link |
So we need to figure out what are the good memes?
link |
What are the good values
link |
that we think we need to optimize for
link |
that like makes people happy and healthy
link |
and like keeps society as robust and safe as possible,
link |
then figure out what the social structure
link |
around those should be.
link |
And only then do we figure out technology,
link |
but we're doing the other way around.
link |
And as much as I love in many ways
link |
the culture of Silicon Valley,
link |
and like I do think that technology has,
link |
I don't wanna knock it.
link |
It's done so many wonderful things for us,
link |
same as capitalism.
link |
There are, we have to like be honest with ourselves.
link |
We're getting to a point where we are losing control
link |
of this very powerful machine that we have created.
link |
Can you redesign the machine within the game?
link |
Can you just have, can you understand the game enough?
link |
Okay, this is the game.
link |
And this is how we start to reemphasize
link |
the memes that matter,
link |
the memes that bring out the best in us.
link |
You know, like the way I try to be in real life
link |
and the way I try to be online
link |
is to be about kindness and love.
link |
And I feel like I'm sometimes get like criticized
link |
for being naive and all those kinds of things.
link |
But I feel like I'm just trying to live within this game.
link |
I'm trying to be authentic.
link |
Yeah, but also like, hey, it's kind of fun to do this.
link |
Like you guys should try this too, you know,
link |
and that's like trying to redesign
link |
some aspects of the game within the game.
link |
I don't know, but I think we should try.
link |
I don't think we have an option but to try.
link |
Well, the other option is to create new companies
link |
or to pressure companies that,
link |
or anyone who has control of the rules of the game.
link |
I think we need to be doing all of the above.
link |
I think we need to be thinking hard
link |
about what are the kind of positive, healthy memes.
link |
You know, as Elon said,
link |
he who controls the memes controls the universe.
link |
I think he did, yeah.
link |
But there's truth to that.
link |
It's very, there is wisdom in that
link |
because memes have driven history.
link |
You know, we are a cultural species.
link |
That's what sets us apart from chimpanzees
link |
and everything else.
link |
We have the ability to learn and evolve through culture
link |
as opposed to biology or like, you know,
link |
classic physical constraints.
link |
And that means culture is incredibly powerful
link |
and we can create and become victim
link |
to very bad memes or very good ones.
link |
But we do have some agency over which memes,
link |
you know, we, but not only put out there,
link |
but we also like subscribe to.
link |
So I think we need to take that approach.
link |
We also need to, you know,
link |
because I don't want, I'm making this video right now
link |
called The Attention Wars,
link |
which is about like how Moloch,
link |
like the media machine is this Moloch machine.
link |
Well, is this kind of like blind dumb thing
link |
where everyone is optimizing for engagement
link |
in order to win their share of the attention pie.
link |
And then if you zoom out,
link |
it's really like Moloch that's pulling the strings
link |
because the only thing that benefits from this in the end,
link |
you know, like our information ecosystem is breaking down.
link |
Like we have, you look at the state of the US,
link |
it's in, we're in a civil war.
link |
It's just not a physical war.
link |
It's an information war.
link |
And people are becoming more fractured
link |
in terms of what their actual shared reality is.
link |
Like truly like an extreme left person,
link |
an extreme right person,
link |
like they literally live in different worlds
link |
in their minds at this point.
link |
And it's getting more and more amplified.
link |
And this force is like a razor blade
link |
pushing through everything.
link |
It doesn't matter how innocuous a topic is,
link |
it will find a way to split into this,
link |
you know, bifurcated cultural and it's fucking terrifying.
link |
Because that maximizes the tension.
link |
And that's like an emergent Moloch type force
link |
that takes anything, any topic
link |
and cuts through it so that it can split nicely
link |
Well, it's whatever, yeah,
link |
all everyone is trying to do within the system
link |
is just maximize whatever gets them the most attention
link |
because they're just trying to make money
link |
so they can keep their thing going, right?
link |
And the best emotion for getting attention,
link |
well, because it's not just about attention on the internet,
link |
it's engagement, that's the key thing, right?
link |
In order for something to go viral,
link |
you need people to actually engage with it.
link |
They need to like comment or retweet or whatever.
link |
And of all the emotions that,
link |
there's like seven classic shared emotions
link |
that studies have found that all humans,
link |
even from like previously uncontacted tribes have.
link |
Some of those are negative, you know, like sadness,
link |
disgust, anger, et cetera, some are positive,
link |
happiness, excitement, and so on.
link |
The one that happens to be the most useful
link |
for the internet is anger.
link |
Because anger, it's such an active emotion.
link |
If you want people to engage, if someone's scared,
link |
and I'm not just like talking out my ass here,
link |
there are studies here that have looked into this.
link |
Whereas like if someone's like,
link |
disgusted or fearful, they actually tend to then be like,
link |
oh, I don't wanna deal with this.
link |
So they're less likely to actually engage
link |
and share it and so on, they're just gonna be like, ugh.
link |
Whereas if they're enraged by a thing,
link |
well now that triggers all the like,
link |
the old tribalism emotions.
link |
And so that's how then things get sort of spread,
link |
you know, much more easily.
link |
They out compete all the other memes in the ecosystem.
link |
And so this like, the attention economy,
link |
the wheels that make it go around are,
link |
I did a tweet, the problem with raging against the machine
link |
is that the machine has learned to feed off rage.
link |
Because it is feeding off our rage.
link |
That's the thing that's now keeping it going.
link |
So the more we get angry, the worse it gets.
link |
So the mullet in this attention,
link |
in the war of attention is constantly maximizing rage.
link |
What it is optimizing for is engagement.
link |
And it happens to be that engagement
link |
is more propaganda, you know.
link |
I mean, it just sounds like everything is putting,
link |
more and more things are being put through this
link |
like propagandist lens of winning
link |
whatever the war is in question.
link |
Whether it's the culture war or the Ukraine war, yeah.
link |
Well, I think the silver lining of this,
link |
do you think it's possible that in the long arc
link |
of this process, you actually do arrive
link |
at greater wisdom and more progress?
link |
It just, in the moment, it feels like people are
link |
tearing each other to shreds over ideas.
link |
But if you think about it, one of the magic things
link |
about democracy and so on, is you have
link |
the blue versus red constantly fighting.
link |
It's almost like they're in discourse,
link |
creating devil's advocate, making devils out of each other.
link |
And through that process, discussing ideas.
link |
Like almost really embodying different ideas
link |
just to yell at each other.
link |
And through the yelling, over the period of decades,
link |
maybe centuries, figuring out a better system.
link |
Like in the moment, it feels fucked up.
link |
But in the long arc, it actually is productive.
link |
That said, we are now in the era of,
link |
just as we have weapons of mass destruction
link |
with nuclear weapons, you know,
link |
that can break the whole playing field,
link |
we now are developing weapons
link |
of informational mass destruction.
link |
Information weapons, you know, WMDs
link |
that basically can be used for propaganda
link |
or just manipulating people however is needed,
link |
whether that's through dumb TikTok videos,
link |
or, you know, there are significant resources being put in.
link |
I don't mean to sound like, you know,
link |
to doom and gloom, but there are bad actors out there.
link |
That's the thing, there are plenty of good actors
link |
within the system who are just trying to stay afloat
link |
in the game, so effectively doing monarchy things.
link |
But then on top of that, we have actual bad actors
link |
who are intentionally trying to, like,
link |
manipulate the other side into doing things.
link |
And using, so because it's a digital space,
link |
they're able to use artificial actors, meaning bots.
link |
Exactly, botnets, you know,
link |
and this is a whole new situation
link |
that we've never had before.
link |
Yeah, it's exciting.
link |
You know what I want to do?
link |
You know what I want to do that,
link |
because there is, you know, people are talking about bots
link |
manipulating and, like, malicious bots
link |
that are basically spreading propaganda.
link |
I want to create, like, a bot army for, like,
link |
that fights that. For love?
link |
Yeah, exactly, for love, that fights, that, I mean.
link |
You know, there's, I mean, there's truth
link |
to fight fire with fire, it's like,
link |
but how you always have to be careful
link |
whenever you create, again, like,
link |
Moloch is very tricky. Yeah, yeah.
link |
Hitler was trying to spread the love, too.
link |
Well, yeah, so we thought, but, you know, I agree with you
link |
that, like, that is a thing that should be considered,
link |
but there is, again, everyone,
link |
the road to hell is paved in good intentions.
link |
And this is, there's always unforeseen circumstances,
link |
you know, outcomes, externalities
link |
of you trying to adopt a thing,
link |
even if you do it in the very best of faith.
link |
But you can learn lessons of history.
link |
If you can run some sims on it first, absolutely.
link |
But also there's certain aspects of a system,
link |
as we've learned through history, that do better than others.
link |
Like, for example, don't have a dictator,
link |
so, like, if I were to create this bot army,
link |
it's not good for me to have full control over it.
link |
Because in the beginning, I might have a good understanding
link |
of what's good and not, but over time,
link |
that starts to get deviated,
link |
because I'll get annoyed at some assholes,
link |
and I'll think, okay, wouldn't it be nice
link |
to get rid of those assholes?
link |
But then that power starts getting to your head,
link |
you become corrupted, that's basic human nature.
link |
So distribute the power somehow.
link |
We need a love botnet on a DAO.
link |
A DAO love botnet.
link |
Yeah, and without a leader, like without...
link |
Well, exactly, a distributed, right,
link |
but yeah, without any kind of centralized...
link |
Yeah, without even, you know,
link |
basically it's the more control,
link |
the more you can decentralize the control of a thing
link |
to people, you know, but the balance...
link |
But then you still need the ability to coordinate,
link |
because that's the issue when something is too,
link |
you know, that's really, to me, like the culture wars,
link |
the bigger war we're dealing with is actually between
link |
the sort of the, I don't know what even the term is for it,
link |
but like centralization versus decentralization.
link |
That's the tension we're seeing.
link |
Power in control by a few versus completely distributed.
link |
And the trouble is if you have a fully centralized thing,
link |
then you're at risk of tyranny, you know,
link |
Stalin type things can happen, or completely distributed.
link |
Now you're at risk of complete anarchy and chaos
link |
but you can't even coordinate to like on, you know,
link |
when there's like a pandemic or anything like that.
link |
So it's like, what is the right balance to strike
link |
between these two structures?
link |
Can't Moloch really take hold
link |
in a fully decentralized system?
link |
That's one of the dangers too.
link |
Yes, very vulnerable to Moloch.
link |
So a dictator can commit huge atrocities,
link |
but they can also make sure the infrastructure works
link |
and trains run on time.
link |
They have that God's eye view at least.
link |
They have the ability to create like laws and rules
link |
that like force coordination, which stops Moloch.
link |
But then you're vulnerable to that dictator
link |
getting infected with like this,
link |
with some kind of psychopathy type thing.
link |
What's reverse Moloch?
link |
Sorry, great question.
link |
So that's where, so I've been working on this series.
link |
It's been driving me insane for the last year and a half.
link |
I did the first one a year ago.
link |
I can't believe it's nearly been a year.
link |
The second one, hopefully will be coming out
link |
And my goal at the end of the series is to like present,
link |
cause basically I'm painting the picture of like
link |
what Moloch is and how it's affecting
link |
almost all these issues in our society
link |
and how it's driving.
link |
It's like kind of the generator function
link |
as people describe it of existential risk.
link |
And then at the end of that.
link |
Wait, wait, the generator function of existential risk.
link |
So you're saying Moloch is sort of the engine
link |
that creates a bunch of X risks.
link |
Yes, not all of them.
link |
Like a, you know, a.
link |
Just a cool phrase, generator function.
link |
It's not my phrase.
link |
It's Daniel Schmacktenberger.
link |
Oh, Schmacktenberger.
link |
I got that from him.
link |
All things, it's like all roads lead back
link |
to Daniel Schmacktenberger, I think.
link |
The dude is, the dude is brilliant.
link |
He's really brilliant.
link |
After that it's Mark Twain.
link |
But anyway, sorry.
link |
Totally rude interruptions from me.
link |
So not all X risks.
link |
So like an asteroid technically isn't
link |
because it's, you know, it's just like
link |
this one big external thing.
link |
It's not like a competition thing going on.
link |
But, you know, synthetic bio, you know,
link |
bio weapons, that's one because everyone's incentivized
link |
to build, even for defense, you know,
link |
bad, bad viruses, you know,
link |
just to threaten someone else, et cetera.
link |
Or AI, technically the race to AGI
link |
is kind of potentially a Molochi situation.
link |
But yeah, so if Moloch is this like generator function
link |
that's driving all of these issues
link |
over the coming century that might wipe us out,
link |
what's the inverse?
link |
And so far what I've gotten to is this character
link |
that I want to put out there called Winwin.
link |
Because Moloch is the God of lose, lose, ultimately.
link |
It masquerades as the God of win, lose,
link |
but in reality it's lose, lose.
link |
Everyone ends up worse off.
link |
So I was like, well, what's the opposite of that?
link |
And I was thinking for ages, like,
link |
what's a good name for this character?
link |
And then tomorrow I was like, okay, well,
link |
don't try and, you know, think through it logically.
link |
What's the vibe of Winwin?
link |
And to me, like in my mind, Moloch is like,
link |
and I addressed that in the video,
link |
like it's red and black.
link |
It's kind of like very, you know, hyper focused
link |
on it's one goal you must win.
link |
So Winwin is kind of actually like these colors.
link |
It's like purple, turquoise.
link |
It's loves games too.
link |
It loves a little bit of healthy competition,
link |
but constrained, like kind of like before,
link |
like knows how to ring fence zero sum competition
link |
into like just the right amount,
link |
whereby its externalities can be controlled
link |
and kept positive.
link |
And then beyond that, it also loves cooperation,
link |
coordination, love, all these other things.
link |
But it's also kind of like mischievous,
link |
like, you know, it will have a good time.
link |
It's not like kind of like boring, you know,
link |
like, oh God, it knows how to have fun.
link |
It can get like, it can get down,
link |
but ultimately it's like unbelievably wise
link |
and it just wants the game to keep going.
link |
And I call it Winwin.
link |
That's a good like pet name, Winwin.
link |
I think the, Winwin, right?
link |
And I think it's formal name when it has to do
link |
like official functions is Omnia.
link |
From like omniscience kind of, why Omnia?
link |
You just like Omnia?
link |
She's like Omniwin.
link |
But I'm open to suggestions.
link |
I would like, you know, and this is.
link |
But there is an angelic kind of sense to Omnia though.
link |
So Winwin is more fun.
link |
So it's more like, it embraces the fun aspect.
link |
I mean, there is something about sort of,
link |
there's some aspect to Winwin interactions
link |
that requires embracing the chaos of the game
link |
and enjoying the game itself.
link |
I don't know what that is.
link |
That's almost like a Zen like appreciation
link |
of the game itself, not optimizing
link |
for the consequences of the game.
link |
Right, well, it's recognizing the value
link |
of competition in of itself about,
link |
it's not like about winning.
link |
It's about you enjoying the process of having a competition
link |
and not knowing whether you're gonna win
link |
or lose this little thing.
link |
But then also being aware that, you know,
link |
what's the boundary?
link |
How big do I want competition to be?
link |
Because one of the reason why Moloch is doing so well now
link |
in our society, in our civilization is
link |
because we haven't been able to ring fence competition.
link |
You know, and so it's just having all
link |
these negative externalities
link |
and it's, we've completely lost control of it.
link |
You know, it's, I think my guess is,
link |
and now we're getting really like,
link |
you know, metaphysical technically,
link |
but I think we'll be in a more interesting universe
link |
if we have one that has both pure cooperation,
link |
you know, lots of cooperation
link |
and some pockets of competition
link |
than one that's purely competition, cooperation entirely.
link |
Like it's good to have some little zero sumness bits,
link |
but I don't know that fully
link |
and I'm not qualified as a philosopher to know that.
link |
And that's what reverse Moloch,
link |
so this kind of win, win creature is a system,
link |
is an antidote to the Moloch system.
link |
And I don't know how it's gonna do that.
link |
But it's good to kind of try to start
link |
to formulate different ideas,
link |
different frameworks of how we think about that.
link |
At the small scale of a collection of individuals
link |
and a large scale of a society.
link |
It's a meme, I think it's an example of a good meme.
link |
And I'm open, I'd love to hear feedback from people
link |
if they think it's, you know, they have a better idea
link |
or it's not, you know,
link |
but it's the direction of memes that we need to spread,
link |
this idea of like, look for the win, wins in life.
link |
Well, on the topic of beauty filters,
link |
so in that particular context
link |
where Moloch creates negative consequences,
link |
Dostoevsky said beauty will save the world.
link |
What is beauty anyway?
link |
It would be nice to just try to discuss
link |
what kind of thing we would like to converge towards
link |
in our understanding of what is beautiful.
link |
So to me, I think something is beautiful
link |
when it can't be reduced down to easy metrics.
link |
Like if you think of a tree, what is it about a tree,
link |
like a big, ancient, beautiful tree, right?
link |
What is it about it that we find so beautiful?
link |
It's not, you know, the sweetness of its fruit
link |
or the value of its lumber.
link |
It's this entirety of it that is,
link |
there's these immeasurable qualities,
link |
it's like almost like a qualia of it.
link |
That's both, like it walks this fine line between pattern,
link |
well, it's got lots of patternicity,
link |
but it's not overly predictable.
link |
Again, it walks this fine line between order and chaos.
link |
It's a very highly complex system.
link |
It's evolving over time,
link |
the definition of a complex versus,
link |
and this is another Schmackt and Berger thing,
link |
a complex versus a complicated system.
link |
A complicated system can be sort of broken down
link |
into bits and pieces,
link |
a complicated system can be sort of broken down into bits,
link |
understood and then put back together.
link |
A complex system is kind of like a black box.
link |
It does all this crazy stuff,
link |
but if you take it apart,
link |
you can't put it back together again,
link |
because there's all these intricacies.
link |
And also very importantly, like there's some of the parts,
link |
sorry, the sum of the whole is much greater
link |
than the sum of the parts.
link |
And that's where the beauty lies, I think.
link |
And I think that extends to things like art as well.
link |
Like there's something immeasurable about it.
link |
There's something we can't break down to a narrow metric.
link |
Does that extend to humans, you think?
link |
So how can Instagram reveal that kind of beauty,
link |
the complexity of a human being?
link |
And this takes us back to dating sites and Goodreads,
link |
Very good question.
link |
I mean, well, I know what it shouldn't do.
link |
It shouldn't try and like, right now,
link |
you know, I was talking to like a social media expert
link |
recently, because I was like, oh, I hate that.
link |
There's such a thing as a social media expert?
link |
Oh, yeah, there are like agencies out there
link |
that you can like outsource,
link |
because I'm thinking about working with one to like,
link |
I want to start a podcast.
link |
You should, you should have done it a long time ago.
link |
It's going to be called Win Win.
link |
And it's going to be about this like positive sum stuff.
link |
And the thing that, you know, they always come back and say,
link |
is like, well, you need to like figure out
link |
what your thing is.
link |
You know, you need to narrow down what your thing is
link |
and then just follow that.
link |
Have like a sort of a formula,
link |
because that's what people want.
link |
They want to know that they're coming back
link |
to the same thing.
link |
And that's the advice on YouTube, Twitter, you name it.
link |
And that's why, and the trouble with that
link |
is that it's a complexity reduction.
link |
And generally speaking, you know,
link |
complexity reduction is bad.
link |
It's making things more, it's an oversimplification.
link |
Not that simplification is always a bad thing.
link |
But when you're trying to take, you know,
link |
what is social media doing?
link |
It's trying to like encapsulate the human experience
link |
and put it into digital form and commodify it to an extent.
link |
That, so you do that, you compress people down
link |
into these like narrow things.
link |
And that's why I think it's kind of ultimately
link |
fundamentally incompatible with at least
link |
my definition of beauty.
link |
It's interesting because there is some sense in which
link |
a simplification sort of in the Einstein kind of sense
link |
of a really complex idea, a simplification in a way
link |
that still captures some core power of an idea of a person
link |
is also beautiful.
link |
And so maybe it's possible for social media to do that.
link |
A presentation, a sort of a slither, a slice,
link |
a look into a person's life that reveals something
link |
But in a simple way, in a way that can be displayed
link |
graphically or through words.
link |
Some way, I mean, in some way Twitter can do
link |
that kind of thing.
link |
A very few set of words can reveal the intricacies
link |
Of course, the viral machine that spreads those words
link |
often results in people taking the thing out of context.
link |
People often don't read tweets in the context
link |
of the human being that wrote them.
link |
The full history of the tweets they've written,
link |
the education level, the humor level,
link |
the world view they're playing around with,
link |
all that context is forgotten and people just see
link |
the different words.
link |
So that can lead to trouble.
link |
But in a certain sense, if you do take it in context,
link |
it reveals some kind of quirky little beautiful idea
link |
or a profound little idea from that particular person
link |
that shows something about that person.
link |
So in that sense, Twitter can be more successful
link |
if we're talking about Mollux is driving
link |
a better kind of incentive.
link |
Yeah, I mean, how they can, like if we were to rewrite,
link |
is there a way to rewrite the Twitter algorithm
link |
so that it stops being the fertile breeding ground
link |
of the culture wars?
link |
Because that's really what it is.
link |
I mean, maybe I'm giving it, Twitter too much power,
link |
but just the more I looked into it
link |
and I had conversations with Tristan Harris
link |
from Center of Humane Technology.
link |
And he explained it as like,
link |
Twitter is where you have this amalgam of human culture
link |
and then this terribly designed algorithm
link |
that amplifies the craziest people
link |
and the angriest most divisive takes and amplifies them.
link |
And then the media, the mainstream media,
link |
because all the journalists are also on Twitter,
link |
they then are informed by that.
link |
And so they draw out the stories they can
link |
from this already like very boiling lava of rage
link |
and then spread that to their millions
link |
and millions of people who aren't even on Twitter.
link |
And so I honestly, I think if I could press a button,
link |
turn them off, I probably would at this point,
link |
because I just don't see a way
link |
of being compatible with healthiness,
link |
but that's not gonna happen.
link |
And so at least one way to like stem the tide
link |
and make it less malachy would be to change,
link |
at least if like it was on a subscription model,
link |
then it's now not optimizing for impressions.
link |
Cause basically what it wants is for people
link |
to keep coming back as often as possible.
link |
That's how they get paid, right?
link |
Every time an ad gets shown to someone
link |
and the way is to get people constantly refreshing their feed.
link |
So you're trying to encourage addictive behaviors.
link |
Whereas if someone, if they moved on
link |
to at least a subscription model,
link |
then they're getting the money either way,
link |
whether someone comes back to the site once a month
link |
or 500 times a month,
link |
they get the same amount of money.
link |
So now that takes away that incentive,
link |
to use technology, to build,
link |
to design an algorithm that is maximally addictive.
link |
That would be one way, for example.
link |
Yeah, but you still want people to,
link |
yeah, I just feel like that just slows down,
link |
creates friction in the virality of things.
link |
We need to slow down virality.
link |
It's good, it's one way.
link |
Virality is malach, to be clear.
link |
So malach is always negative then?
link |
Yes, by definition.
link |
Competition is not always negative.
link |
Competition is neutral.
link |
I disagree with you that all virality is negative then,
link |
Because it's a good intuition,
link |
because we have a lot of data on virality being negative.
link |
But I happen to believe that the core of human beings,
link |
so most human beings want to be good
link |
more than they want to be bad to each other.
link |
And so I think it's possible,
link |
it might be just harder to engineer systems
link |
that enable virality,
link |
but it's possible to engineer systems that are viral
link |
that enable virality.
link |
And the kind of stuff that rises to the top
link |
is things that are positive.
link |
And positive, not like la la positive,
link |
it's more like win win,
link |
meaning a lot of people need to be challenged.
link |
You grow from it, it might challenge you,
link |
you might not like it, but you ultimately grow from it.
link |
And ultimately bring people together
link |
as opposed to tear them apart.
link |
I deeply want that to be true.
link |
And I very much agree with you that people at their core
link |
are on average good, care for each other,
link |
as opposed to not.
link |
Like I think it's actually a very small percentage
link |
of people are truly wanting to do
link |
just like destructive malicious things.
link |
Most people are just trying to win their own little game.
link |
And they don't mean to be,
link |
they're just stuck in this badly designed system.
link |
That said, the current structure, yes,
link |
is the current structure means that virality
link |
is optimized towards Moloch.
link |
That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions.
link |
Sometimes positive stories do go viral
link |
and I think we should study them.
link |
I think there should be a whole field of study
link |
into understanding, identifying memes
link |
that above a certain threshold of the population
link |
agree is a positive, happy, bringing people together meme.
link |
The kind of thing that brings families together
link |
that would normally argue about cultural stuff
link |
at the table, at the dinner table.
link |
Identify those memes and figure out what it was,
link |
what was the ingredient that made them spread that day.
link |
And also like not just like happiness
link |
and connection between humans,
link |
but connection between humans in other ways
link |
that enables like productivity, like cooperation,
link |
solving difficult problems and all those kinds of stuff.
link |
So it's not just about let's be happy
link |
and have a fulfilling lives.
link |
It's also like, let's build cool shit.
link |
Let's get excited.
link |
Which is the spirit of collaboration,
link |
which is deeply anti Moloch, right?
link |
That's, it's not using competition.
link |
It's like, Moloch hates collaboration and coordination
link |
and people working together.
link |
And that's, again, like the internet started out as that
link |
and it could have been that,
link |
but because of the way it was sort of structured
link |
in terms of, you know, very lofty ideal,
link |
they wanted everything to be open source,
link |
open source and also free.
link |
And, but they needed to find a way to pay the bills anyway,
link |
because they were still building this
link |
on top of our old economics system.
link |
And so the way they did that
link |
was through third party advertisement.
link |
But that meant that things were very decoupled.
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You know, you've got this third party interest,
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which means that you're then like,
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people having to optimize for that.
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And that is, you know, the actual consumer
link |
is actually the product,
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not the person you're making the thing for.
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In the end, you start making the thing for the advertiser.
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And so that's why it then like breaks down.
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Yeah, like it's, there's no clean solution to this.
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And I, it's a really good suggestion by you actually
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to like figure out how we can optimize virality
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for positive sum topics.
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I shall be the general of the love bot army.
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Distributed, distributed, no, okay, yeah.
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The power, just even in saying that,
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the power already went to my head.
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No, okay, you've talked about quantifying your thinking.
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We've been talking about this,
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sort of a game theoretic view on life
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and putting probabilities behind estimates.
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Like if you think about different trajectories
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you can take through life,
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just actually analyzing life in game theoretic way,
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like your own life, like personal life.
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I think you've given an example
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that you had an honest conversation with Igor
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about like, how long is this relationship gonna last?
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So similar to our sort of marriage problem
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kind of discussion, having an honest conversation
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about the probability of things
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that we sometimes are a little bit too shy
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or scared to think of in a probabilistic terms.
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Can you speak to that kind of way of reasoning,
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the good and the bad of that?
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Can you do this kind of thing with human relations?
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Yeah, so the scenario you're talking about, it was like.
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Yeah, tell me about that scenario.
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Yeah, I think it was about a year into our relationship
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and we were having a fairly heavy conversation
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because we were trying to figure out
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whether or not I was gonna sell my apartment.
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Well, you know, he had already moved in,
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but I think we were just figuring out
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what like our longterm plans would be.
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We should be by a place together, et cetera.
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When you guys are having that conversation,
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are you like drunk out of your mind on wine
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or is he sober and you're actually having a serious?
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I think we were sober.
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How do you get to that conversation?
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Because most people are kind of afraid
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to have that kind of serious conversation.
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Well, so our relationship was very,
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well, first of all, we were good friends
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for a couple of years before we even got romantic.
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And when we did get romantic,
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it was very clear that this was a big deal.
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It wasn't just like another, it wasn't a random thing.
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So the probability of it being a big deal was high.
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It was already very high.
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And then we'd been together for a year
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and it had been pretty golden and wonderful.
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So, you know, there was a lot of foundation already
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where we felt very comfortable
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having a lot of frank conversations.
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But Igor's MO has always been much more than mine.
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He was always from the outset,
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like just in a relationship,
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radical transparency and honesty is the way
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because the truth is the truth,
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whether you want to hide it or not, you know,
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but it will come out eventually.
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And if you aren't able to accept difficult things yourself,
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then how could you possibly expect to be like
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the most integral version that, you know,
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you can't, the relationship needs this bedrock
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of like honesty as a foundation more than anything.
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Yeah, that's really interesting,
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but I would like to push against some of those ideas,
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but that's the down the line, yes, throw them up.
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I just rudely interrupt.
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And so, you know, we'd been about together for a year
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and things were good
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and we were having this hard conversation
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and then he was like, well, okay,
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what's the likelihood that we're going to be together
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in three years then?
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Because I think it was roughly a three year time horizon.
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And I was like, ooh, ooh, interesting.
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And then we were like, actually wait,
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before you said out loud,
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let's both write down our predictions formally
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because we'd been like,
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we're just getting into like effective altruism
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and rationality at the time,
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which is all about making formal predictions
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as a means of measuring your own,
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well, your own foresight essentially in a quantified way.
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So we like both wrote down our percentages
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and we also did a one year prediction
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and a 10 year one as well.
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So we got percentages for all three
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and then we showed each other.
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And I remember like having this moment of like, ooh,
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because for the 10 year one, I was like, well, I mean,
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but like a lot can happen in 10 years,
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and we've only been together for,
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so I was like, I think it's over 50%,
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but it's definitely not 90%.
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And I remember like wrestling,
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I was like, oh, but I don't want him to be hurt.
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I don't want him to,
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I don't want to give a number lower than his.
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And I remember thinking, I was like, ah, ah, don't game it.
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This is an exercise in radical honesty.
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So just give your real percentage.
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And I think mine was like 75%.
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And then we showed each other
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and luckily we were fairly well aligned.
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And, but honestly, even if we weren't.
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It definitely would have,
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I, if his had been consistently lower than mine,
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that would have rattled me for sure.
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Whereas if it had been the other way around,
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I think he would have,
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he's just kind of like a water off a duck's back type of guy.
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It'd be like, okay, well, all right, we'll figure this out.
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Well, did you guys provide error bars on the estimate?
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Like the level of uncertainty?
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They came built in.
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We didn't give formal plus or minus error bars.
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I didn't draw any or anything like that.
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Well, I guess that's the question I have is,
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did you feel informed enough to make such decisions?
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Cause like, I feel like if you were,
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if I were to do this kind of thing rigorously,
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I would want some data.
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I would want to set one of the assumptions you have
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is you're not that different from other relationships.
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And so I want to have some data about the way.
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You want the base rates.
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Yeah, and also actual trajectories of relationships.
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I would love to have like time series data
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about the ways that relationships fall apart or prosper,
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how they collide with different life events,
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losses, job changes, moving.
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Both partners find jobs, only one has a job.
link |
I want that kind of data
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and how often the different trajectories change in life.
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Like how informative is your past to your future?
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That's the whole thing.
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Like can you look at my life and have a good prediction
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about in terms of my characteristics and my relationships,
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what that's going to look like in the future or not?
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I don't even know the answer to that question.
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I'll be very ill informed in terms of making the probability.
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I would be far, yeah, I just would be under informed.
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I would be under informed.
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I'll be over biasing to my prior experiences, I think.
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Right, but as long as you're aware of that
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and you're honest with yourself,
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and you're honest with the other person,
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say, look, I have really wide error bars on this
link |
for the following reasons, that's okay.
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I still think it's better than not trying
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to quantify it at all.
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If you're trying to make really major
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irreversible life decisions.
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And I feel also the romantic nature of that question
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for me personally, I try to live my life
link |
thinking it's very close to 100%.
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Like, allowing myself actually the,
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this is the difficulty of this is allowing myself
link |
to think differently, I feel like has
link |
a psychological consequence.
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That's where that, that's one of my pushbacks
link |
against radical honesty is this one particular perspective.
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So you're saying you would rather give
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a falsely high percentage to your partner.
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Going back to the wide sage filth.
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In order to sort of create this additional optimism.
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Of fake it till you make it.
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The positive, the power of positive thinking.
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Hashtag positivity.
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Yeah, hashtag, it's with a hashtag.
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Well, so that, and this comes back to this idea
link |
of useful fictions, right?
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And I agree, I don't think there's a clear answer to this.
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And I think it's actually quite subjective.
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Some people this works better for than others.
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You know, to be clear, Igor and I weren't doing
link |
this formal prediction in it.
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Like we did it with very much tongue in cheek.
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It wasn't like we were going to make,
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I don't think it even would have drastically changed
link |
what we decided to do even.
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We kind of just did it more as a fun exercise.
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For the consequence of that fun exercise,
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you really actually kind of, there was a deep honesty to it.
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Exactly, it was a deep, and it was, yeah,
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it was just like this moment of reflection.
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I'm like, oh wow, I actually have to think
link |
like through this quite critically and so on.
link |
And it's also what was interesting was I got to like check
link |
in with what my desires were.
link |
So there was one thing of like what my actual prediction is,
link |
but what are my desires and could these desires
link |
be affecting my predictions and so on.
link |
And you know, that's a method of rationality.
link |
And I personally don't think it loses anything in terms of,
link |
I didn't take any of the magic away
link |
from our relationship, quite the opposite.
link |
Like it brought us closer together because it was like,
link |
we did this weird fun thing that I appreciate
link |
a lot of people find quite strange.
link |
And I think it was somewhat unique in our relationship
link |
that both of us are very, we both love numbers,
link |
we both love statistics, we're both poker players.
link |
So this was kind of like our safe space anyway.
link |
For others, one partner really might not
link |
like that kind of stuff at all, in which case
link |
this is not a good exercise to do.
link |
I don't recommend it to everybody.
link |
But I do think there's, it's interesting sometimes
link |
to poke holes in the probe at these things
link |
that we consider so sacred that we can't try
link |
to quantify them, which is interesting
link |
because that's in tension with like the idea
link |
of what we just talked about with beauty
link |
and like what makes something beautiful,
link |
the fact that you can't measure everything about it.
link |
And perhaps something shouldn't be tried to measure,
link |
maybe it's wrong to completely try and value
link |
the utilitarian, put a utilitarian frame
link |
of measuring the utility of a tree in its entirety.
link |
I don't know, maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't.
link |
I'm ambivalent on that.
link |
But overall, people have too many biases.
link |
People are overly biased against trying to do
link |
like a quantified cost benefit analysis
link |
on really tough life decisions.
link |
They're like, oh, just go with your gut.
link |
It's like, well, sure, but guts, our intuitions
link |
are best suited for things that we've got tons
link |
of experience in, then we can really, you don't trust on it.
link |
If it's a decision we've made many times,
link |
but if it's like, should I marry this person
link |
or should I buy this house over that house?
link |
You only make those decisions a couple of times
link |
in your life, maybe.
link |
Well, I would love to know, there's a balance,
link |
probably is a personal balance to strike
link |
is the amount of rationality you apply
link |
to a question versus the useful fiction,
link |
the fake it till you make it.
link |
For example, just talking to soldiers in Ukraine,
link |
you ask them, what's the probability of you winning,
link |
Almost everybody I talk to is 100%.
link |
And you listen to the experts, right?
link |
They say all kinds of stuff.
link |
They are, first of all, the morale there
link |
is higher than probably enough.
link |
I've never been to a war zone before this,
link |
but I've read about many wars
link |
and I think the morale in Ukraine is higher
link |
than almost any war I've read about.
link |
It's every single person in the country
link |
is proud to fight for their country.
link |
Everybody, not just soldiers, not everybody.
link |
Why do you think that is?
link |
Specifically more than in other wars?
link |
I think because there's perhaps a dormant desire
link |
for the citizens of this country to find
link |
the identity of this country because it's been
link |
going through this 30 year process
link |
of different factions and political bickering
link |
and they haven't had, as they talk about,
link |
they haven't had their independence war.
link |
They say all great nations have had an independence war.
link |
They had to fight for their independence,
link |
for the discovery of the identity of the core
link |
of the ideals that unify us and they haven't had that.
link |
There's constantly been factions, there's been divisions,
link |
there's been pressures from empires,
link |
from the United States and from Russia,
link |
from NATO and Europe, everybody telling them what to do.
link |
Now they want to discover who they are
link |
and there's that kind of sense that we're going to fight
link |
for the safety of our homeland,
link |
but we're also gonna fight for our identity.
link |
And that, on top of the fact that there's just,
link |
if you look at the history of Ukraine
link |
and there's certain other countries like this,
link |
there are certain cultures that are feisty
link |
in their pride of being the citizens of that nation.
link |
Ukraine is that, Poland was that.
link |
You just look at history.
link |
In certain countries, you do not want to occupy.
link |
I mean, both Stalin and Hitler talked about Poland
link |
in this way, they're like, this is a big problem
link |
if we occupy this land for prolonged periods of time.
link |
They're gonna be a pain in their ass.
link |
They're not going to want to be occupied.
link |
And certain other countries are pragmatic.
link |
They're like, well, leaders come and go.
link |
I guess this is good.
link |
Ukraine just doesn't have, Ukrainians,
link |
throughout the 20th century,
link |
don't seem to be the kind of people
link |
that just sit calmly and let the quote unquote occupiers
link |
impose their rules.
link |
That's interesting though, because you said it's always been
link |
under conflict and leaders have come and gone.
link |
So you would expect them to actually be the opposite
link |
under that like reasoning.
link |
Well, because it's a very fertile land,
link |
it's great for agriculture.
link |
So a lot of people want to,
link |
I mean, I think they've developed this culture
link |
because they've constantly been occupied
link |
by different people for the different peoples.
link |
And so maybe there is something to that
link |
where you've constantly had to feel like within the blood
link |
of the generations, there's the struggle against the man,
link |
against the imposition of rules, against oppression
link |
and all that kind of stuff, and that stays with them.
link |
So there's a will there, but a lot of other aspects
link |
are also part of it that has to do with
link |
the reverse Mollet kind of situation
link |
where social media has definitely played a part of it.
link |
Also different charismatic individuals
link |
have had to play a part.
link |
The fact that the president of the nation, Zelensky,
link |
stayed in Kiev during the invasion
link |
is a huge inspiration to them
link |
because most leaders, as you can imagine,