Mindscape 102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason

Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
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Mindscape Podcast playlist: • Mindscape Podcast
The best chess and Go players in the world aren’t human beings any more; they’re artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for understanding how rationality works in real-world situations: it features stochastic events, incomplete information, Bayesian updating, game theory, reading other people, a battle between emotions and reason, and real-world stakes. Maria Konnikova started in psychology, turned to writing, and then took up professional-level poker, and has learned a lot along the way about the challenges of being rational. We talk about what games like poker can teach us about thinking and human psychology.
Maria Konnikova received her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She is currently a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of two bestselling books, The Confidence Game and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Among her awards are the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. She is a successful tournament poker player and Ambassador for PokerStars. She is the host of The Grift podcast. Her new book is The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win.
#podcast #ideas #science #philosophy #culture

[@Fixundfertig1]

Erik Seidel as a personal poker coach, gosh, that is heaven, he's one of my absolute favorites.

[@jennydeepable]

ANOTHER AMAZING PODCAST

[@emilylowrance7930]

very informative

[@Skankhunt420.]

I've learnt that poker translates really well when investing in the stock market

[@MyYouTubeNameisTaken]

Sean, I’d love to play you in poker. Maybe hold mindscape poker games on your patreon.

[@bennguyen1313]

Regarding the 51m mark, on being process-driven instead of results-driven.. how can this be applied to the current covid situation? It seems every state/country handled it differently, yet even those with a similar approach, often had very different outcomes. So in the end, does this suggest *LUCK* had much more influence than any one strategy? Are there simply too many variables, that it's impossible to draw conclusions about what the *RIGHT* process is?

[@robertglass1698]

In the Monty Hall problem, if I chose to change doors and was wrong, you would say my model was good? I mean, I had a 33% of winning. 33% chances happen all the time. edited: I had "not change doors" originally. Thank you lee patterson for the correction.

[@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself]

Depends on if you are trying to satisfy or optimize. What are other risk-reward factors? Time? Efficiency?

[@Scrambleverse]

If you are not choosing to change doors then it is not a good model. “Not switching” bets on picking correctly initially (33%). “Switching” bets on being incorrect initially (66%).

[@robertglass1698]

@@Scrambleverse Thanks, I had it backward. Monday mornings. The point is still appropriate, that saying Trump had a 30% chance of winning when there were only two possible outcomes wasn't a very high chance.

[@leomarcus8845]

It was reported last year (2019) that a CMU AI program did beat some poker pros. So what did you mean by saying poker is still a challenge for AI?

[@Skankhunt420.]

The AI bot wasnt even close to playing the best players in the world. I could have beaten those guys. And they were playing under a strict set of rules where the bot found it a lot easier to make calculations. E.g they had to reset to 100bb's every hand - The current top 3 holdem players are Linus Loeliger, Timofey Kuznetsov and Jonas Mols

[@StirsMYCookiez]

GO has not been solved

[@23uvas]

its a flawed game

[@badwolf8112]

it has been solved,,, alphago

[@jackielikesgme9228]

More like AI has solved the problem of loosing to humans lol solved wasn’t the right word to use here I agree

[@FABRIZIOZPH]

poker is all luck..

[@remogaggi82]

Rigghhtttt

[@ck58npj72]

I want you at my table😉

[@Skankhunt420.]

@@DenkyManner They dont. Tournaments are super volatile with high variance. The people that have won the most money have done so through tournaments due to variance but arent the best technical players - its easy to find the best cash game players. Just go to pokerstars and find the players that no one wants to sit with