Final Table Time

It’s November 9 time – the final table of the WSOP Main Event which is, of course, generally played in November will begin next week. For those of you who aren’t poker junkies, this started some months back when some 6300+ souls each shelled out 10,000 coconuts for the privilege to play in this event. They began back in Vegas’s blistering summer heat – though the cavernous rooms at the Rio were freoned down to somewhere in the neighborhood of your local meat hanger. After seven grueling days they winnowed the field down to a mere nine, the fabled “November 9.” As I noted in an earlier post, these nine are the luckiest of a very talented bunch and it was fun watching the TV feed. It was also instructive. Things of note:

First, luck had the lead role. Two players, Carlos Mortensen, a previous winner of this prestigious event, sucked out at least three times that we saw. In an interview he acknowledged that he had been outrageously lucky to have lasted as long as he did. If you didn’t watch, he was the FT Bubble Boy – he finished 10^th which isn’t shabby at all and earned him a satisfying 573,000 rutabagas. Twelfth-place finisher Rep Porter hit so many unlikely magic rivers that even the TV crew was stunned. Sylvain Loosli went on a heater that, at one point, elevated him to position of chip leader (though he is currently in 6^th place). He hit so many hands for a time that he actually looked embarrassed.

But this is ordinary and obvious and, well you know, it kind of has to be this way. You’ve got a bunch of astonishingly skilled players going up against each other. They differ only marginally from each other in overall knowledge, cunning, skill and emotional stability so luck has to be the dominant factor. Yes? Yes, of course … but not so fast.

There’s another element here that’s not being talked about and it just might be the most important one of all. These guys (and, yes, the final table is, again, all male as it has been with one fleeting exception when Barbara Enright finished 5^th in 1995) all care about the money – and caring about the money can cost you so much money.

There were several hands that were give-aways. J. C. Tran (current chip leader and all-around good guy) won two medium-sized pots with small pairs when his opponent checked behind him on the flop, turn and river. Several other hands had similar scenarios. Players checked where, earlier in the tournament they would have bet. Several players called in situations where they would, earlier in the tournament, have raised. Somehow the advantage of position seemed to be lost on them.

The more I watched the more familiar this felt. These guys, some of the best in the world, were playing like the mid-level folks I (and most of you) play with. They were playing tournament poker, not like it was the Main Event, but like it was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill buy-in tournament, the kind that most of us are used to. The reason seemed obvious to me – these guys care about the money just like the folks who play at the mid- and low-levels of the game do. At your local poker room, those who regularly play the 100 banana buy-in events play like just this when it gets down close to the final table. They worry that their opponent who checked the flop and the turn has a big hand and is trying to draw them into a bet so he can check-raise the river. They are suspicious that if they try a steal bet they’ll get raised off the hand. They sit there with their pocket 6s and assume that the other guy hit one of the three over cards on the board. They get cautious and just go for the show-down hoping they’re best. They’re trying to keep the pots small. They’re playing defensive poker.

Then I flashed back to the intro scenes to the show where a montage is put together of great moments in poker and one of them is Stuey Unger pushing all his chips in and I suddenly realized why he was such a great player, maybe (certainly? who knows, it was a different time, an earlier era) the best ever. Stuey didn’t care about the money. It didn’t matter, not at all. No matter how much he won he knew he would lose it shooting craps or betting on football. The money was just a tool, something he needed so he could gamble. If 1^st place paid 20 zucchinis or 2 million it didn’t matter. Winning was what he was passionate about and if he won twenty bucks he would lose that. If he won two million, he would lose that.

He would have eaten these guys alive. There is no way that he would have checked back a third time with a raggedy-ass king high. He would have cut his wrists before checking 4,4 on the river after his opponent checked back on the flop and turn. There’s a reason why Unger won a third of all the major tournaments he entered in his life. No, that’s not a typo. Not “cashed in.” “Won.” A big piece of it was because he didn’t give a flying fuck about the money and he consistently steamrolled opponents because they did.

Will things change when the final table play begins? Dunno. Let’s all tune in and see. My guess is that we’ll see a bit less tentativeness and a bit more aggression. The big thing was making it to the November 9 simply because you can’t win the damn thing unless you do – and if you care about that and care about the money and you’re not some really crazy, brilliant, fucked-up crack-head, muddle-brained genius, you’re going to be wary, very wary….

I have seen the future (politically speaking)

I have seen the future. It ain’t pretty. It also isn’t anything like what most pundits, commentators and so-called experts think it will be. The movement that everyone acknowledges is gathering steam is the steady rotting away of what used to be the “Grand Old Party.” It is dying, but in name only. It is, of course, being replaced by the Tea Party and the influence of their stalwarts like Cruz, Paul and Palin will continue to grow. But – and this is the key – their numbers will not increase but their influence will. The reason? Because the real Republicans are leaving.

The accepted wisdom in the Beltway says differently. The standard analysis in the MSM and the blogosphere is that the grown-ups will assert themselves, spank the disobedient children and send them off to bed until they learn to mend their ways. I don’t think so.

First, not enough of the moderates in the party are going to do this and for damn good reasons. They’ll get ‘primaried’ and having seen what can and has happened to some of their brethren, they’re scared. Second, these aren’t the kinds of children whom you can take to woodshed for a whuppin’. They fight back and they are in many cases bigger and nastier than you imagine. The grown-ups aren’t stupid. They realize that they are dealing with people who were delighted with the sequester, triumphant when the government was closed and deeply saddened and disappointed when they were unable to wreck the economic foundations of the country. These folks just don’t care about the well-being of Americans. They’re ideologues and march to a distant drummer whose sounds only they can hear. They’re not about to care what some dusty old GOP standard-bearers think and they are sharpening their knives for the next fiscal crises in January and February, the next chance they will have to bring it all down.

What’s going to happen is that the moderate Republicans are going to become Democrats. “Wow,” you might think. “That’s so cool. The Democrats will take back the House, control the Senate, win the White House and we’ll get real progressive policies in place.”

Not so fast. These folks will really be DINOs (think Joe Manchin, Dick Durbin, Chuck Hagel, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Michael Bloomberg). They do have socially progressive views and this will be good for maintaining the movements on things like immigration, civil rights and decriminalizing (some) drugs. But their economic views and their positions on regulatory reform in the financial sector are just what the GOP always stood for. Their perspectives on the free-market and international issues are right out of the Bush I playbook.

How and when will you know this is happening? As usual, follow the money. Take a look at where the cash starts moving. If I’m right, many deep pocketed moderates who usually put 75% or so on the GOP and hedged their bets with smaller donations to Blue Dog Democrats will begin shifting the balance. They will move more toward moderate Democrats, ones with progressive social values but conservative economic beliefs. In short, they will try to turn the modern Democratic Party into what the GOP used to be.

The future I see is one where the Tea Party will accomplish their goal of destroying the party that gave us the Black Dude in the White House by turning it into the Republican Party that they hate almost (but not quite) as much.

Irony knows few bounds.

Why are we humans so smart?

Philosophers like to pose “big” questions, ones that tickle the mind, make us think and make sure that when we do think we do it honestly. In the philosophy of science, an area I have more than a passing interest in, they also have great fun probing issues that scientists are pursuing. The best of these have been ones like “How did life begin?” or “How do brains ‘make’ consciousness?” or “What was there before the Big Bang?”

Note, these questions are ones that, in principle, have answers. I’m not including what others might call biggies like “Is God real?” or “Is there an afterlife?” Those are questions for theologians to ponder. Unlike the others, there are no verifiable answers to be had.

Throughout my fifty or so years as a cognitive scientist with an interest in the philosophy of mind, I’ve been intrigued by the one about consciousness. I think I’ve got a novel answer to it which I’ll get to some other day. Here, I’d like to ask that “biggie” that’s in the title and ask it in a way that makes it easy to talk about:

“Why are we so much smarter than we need to be?”

I think that’s a good way to phrase it. We evolved as a cognitively sophisticated species capable of thriving as hunter-gatherers living in relatively small groups for mutual aid, security and companionship. We hung around in this state for tens of thousands of years. In fact, in some isolated and remote regions, particularly in the Amazon, we still live in much this manner. Clearly, we’re smart enough to operate in this kind of ecological niche and do it with success.

But if a child born into one of these isolated tribes were, shortly after birth, relocated to Paris or Tokyo or Boston and grew up in a complex modern society they would be just fine. He or she would grow up to be a lawyer or a bank teller, maybe a cab driver or a philosopher because they are us and we are them. Whatever smarts we needed to function in these environments were housed in the same neuro-cognitive core we have today. When they evolved they allowed us to hunt cooperatively, develop complex kinship systems, acquire language, a sense of humor, rituals and religions. How is it that these rather mundane functions held within them the reserve capacity to develop string theory, program computers or ask questions like the one I’m asking here which requires nested representations (brains asking questions about brains)?

This disconnect is astonishingly difficult to explain. What is it about the human brain that it houses such remarkable residual cognitive capacity? What’s the point, from an evolutionary point of view, of having an organ that has this potential when it wasn’t “needed” for thousands of years? No other species has anything approaching this gulf between what is done compared with what can be done. Even the cleverest like bonobos, cetaceans or corvids have a terrible time trying to elevate cognitive functions beyond the upper bounds imposed by evolution. Corvids can be taught to solve some puzzles and chimpanzees can learn to deal with numbers, maybe as high as 9. Cetaceans may still have some of our kind of cognitive reserve but it’s awfully hard to do the research to find out and living in water without fingers is going to impose restrictions.

And there’s another wrinkle here. Being smart isn’t cheap. There are lots of tricky elements involved in calculating how much energy our brains use but the general consensus is that it’s around 15 to 20 percent of the body’s total expenditures – a lot for an organ that makes up only 1 to 3 percent of total body mass.

One possibility is that the energy needed for “serious thinking” isn’t that much compared with the brain’s total needs. Estimates vary but a common finding is that when engaged in careful thought, problem solving or complex executive functions the structures involved are only using some 1 or 2 percent of total metabolic expenditures. It could be, I guess, that whatever fluky mutations produced our extraordinary cognitive reserve weren’t very costly in any Darwinian way. So they just hung around in case we had a little leisure time one day and wanted to try working out symbolic logic or figuring out how to move the world with a fulcrum and a place to stand.

Another possibility is that there are common cognitive components to things that seem so sophisticated like solving some of the arcane mathematics of quantum mechanics and ordinary processes like those that give rise to a sense of humor. This, if true, would make our opportunistic, analytic brain a classic Gould-Lewontin “spandrel,” a system whose non-essential but ultimately wonderfully adaptive functions piggybacked on other critical forms.

Who knows? Not me. That’s the conundrum du jour.

Deities and Diets

Q: What do diets and religions have in common?

A: There are many of each.

That may not seem like a very insightful answer, even if it is true. But there’s some subtlety here. When you have a very large number of things, be they ideas, principles, theories, programs, whatevers some truths emerge.

The first is that the claims made are invariably mutually contradictory. Diets that tell you to cut back on carbs don’t jibe with ones that tell you to cut back on fats. Ones that tell you to eat more veggies don’t sit well with others that emphasize proteins. Religions that are monotheistic run up uncomfortably against those with many gods. Those that preach gender and racial equality sit squirmingly alongside those that diminish women or demonize other ethnic or racial groups.

The second truth is that none of them are right, none are true in any fundamental way, none are the path to either slimness or salvation and none are the guaranteed road to eternal anything.

It kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? When you have a very large number of proposed answers to questions or solutions to problems that are mutually contradictory or interactively incoherent you can be pretty sure that they’re all wrong. It’s just wildly unlikely that exactly one of them got it while all the others missed it. So where is truth?

Well, let’s answer this one for religion first. The truth, and any sensible worldly soul who has given this question even a smidgen of thought knows this, is that one’s own religion is just as wrong and misguided as all the others. To assume, as most do, that you just managed to stumble onto The Truth while all the other poor benighted bastards cling to falseness, is little more than an exercise in hubris. It is also one of the primary reasons for so much bloodletting over the years. No, it’s far better to just acknowledge that whatever your theological convictions may be, they are merely beliefs, articles of faith that you cling to independent of any knowable truth.

Once you see this you are faced with the only workable course of action. Instead of seeing your religion as some embodiment of all-seeing God(s) who conveniently plucked your little band out for his/her/their special blessing, you should view it as a vehicle for living a good life. Embrace the empathic elements that most religions have; listen to its moral threads; use its code of ethics to live a better, more fulfilling life. You don’t have to have Yahweh by the short and curlies to recognize that virtually all the founders of the world’s great religions, from the Buddha to Moses, Jesus and Mohammad and to the multiple deities of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples of the North Pacific Coastal regions, preached peace, forgiveness and decency.

We can all find truth by being wrong.

Diets have a fascinating parallel. All are wrong. None of them have the key to the underlying psychophysiology that underlies weight loss, weight control and weight maintenance. They’re just like religions. If you believe they work and follow their guidelines you have a chance of getting to where you want your body to be but for reasons other than those announced by the diet gurus. If there were a diet that actually worked it would have quickly displaced all the others. If there were one weight loss (and weight maintenance) program that was effective, by now everyone who wanted to lose weight would have gone on it.

The reason that the scores (hundreds?) of faddish diets fail is because they are focused on quick gains and not on life-style changes. All of them will produce weight loss but, because none of them give you the opportunity to allow your underlying physiology to adjust, the weight is almost always (over 90% of the time) put back on and most of the time more goes back than came off in the first place. 

What works? Well, it’s like with religion. Embrace what you wish but focus on and follow underlying principles. First, you have to reduce caloric intake. Second, you have to exercise. Third, you have to lose weight slowly and allow your metabolism to adjust.

Eight months ago I felt heavy, too heavy. I hit 213 and didn’t like it – or what “it” looked like. I set a goal to lose between two and three pounds a month. I did not change my “diet” in any way. No low-carb or high-protein or high or low anything. No Atkins, no South Beach or Mediterranean, Jenny Craig, Ornish or Dash. I just reduced portion size, ate more slowly, chewed more thoroughly, worked on savoring flavors and textures and allowed each meal to last longer. I reduced snacks to a minimum and treated a handful of pretzels the same way I dealt with a pork chop. Nibble and savor.

I work out regularly but I did that before. My joke is that the weight gain before was because muscle is heavier than fat – fooled myself for a time but truth came barreling in as it is wont to do.

Do I ever feel hungry? Yes. But I’ve learned to embrace it, savor it. There’s something satisfying in viewing this feeling as an existential moment to be contemplated dispassionately – hunger as the color red, the sound of a frog croaking on a distant pond, hunger as just another piece of the larger puzzle of life.

That’s it. No “diet” in the usual sense but a true “diet” in the real meaning of the word which is, “what an individual usually eats and drinks.” Eight months later my weight is 183. I enjoy eating more now. Meals are moments to savor. I think I’m stable here. We’ll see what happens in the months and years to come. I’ll let you know.

Oh, yes of course, I almost forgot: I view religion the same way. Embrace the deeper message. Live the empathic life but bond with none. Hate and suffering are shed like unwanted pounds. Deities and diets are illusions – but, if you’re careful, they mark a road worth walking.

Political Rant: Crackpots in Congress

The federal government has been shut down. In two weeks the country may default on its debt. There has been much head-scratching about how we got here. Here’s how:

The crazy tail currently wagging the GOP dog wanted this government shut down. They have been plotting it for years. They want the US to default on its debts as well. Unless the grown-ups among the Republicans in the House come to their senses they will get precisely what they wish. From Ted Cruz to Mike Lee, Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert, the Tea Party faithful were giddy with delight when the lights were turned out and the doors shuttered. They are rubbing their hands in cheerful anticipation of a default.

Obama first grasped how insane this faction is back with the sequester. He went into those debates thinking that no one would be idiotic enough to actually cut that much from spending when the economy was still so fragile. He found, to his and now our dismay, that not only were they happy to have the sequester, they actually thought it was too small — and now that it’s in place they will never agree to remove it.

You cannot reason with them by pointing to the damage being done. They do not care. You cannot argue with them by noting the inconsistencies in their positions. They do not care. You cannot bargain with them because they do not want bargains. You cannot compromise with them because they want nothing short of all-out capitulation.

Accusations against Democrats that they are not compromising are merely vaguely transparent goads to extract ‘give backs’ – a strategy that worked in the past, before Obama came to understand what he was dealing with. Its use now is merely rhetorical, to make it appear to the American public that somehow both parties are complicit in this crisis. They are not. It is wholly the product of one extremist faction of the Republican party and anything they can do to continue it, they will.

The media have been implicated in this farrago as well. For the most part the MSM tries to be fair. It’s a badge of honor in journalism to give both sides a chance to express themselves, not to approach a topic with a bias. The right wing realized decades ago that there were gains to be made among the media by accusing them of a liberal bias. It worked. Liberals are prone to guilt. The result has been totally misplaced reporting where the typical article is one that glosses over Tea Party bull crap and talks about how both sides are implicated and compromise is needed. It is painfully reminiscent of reporting on Joe McCarthy’s bizarre assault on mythical communists – though eventually even the most neutral of journalists eventually came to recognize the bleeding obvious, that McCarthy was a lunatic and a thug.

This current slouching toward Armageddon is central to the long-term goal of the crack-pot radicals on the right: to reduce the central government to a mere shadow of itself, to diminish its role to national defense and perhaps one or two other functions such as adjudicating inter-state commerce and squabbles. Grover Norquist famously said he wanted to reduce government to the size where he could “drown it in a bathtub.” Well, these folks took his metaphor literally and even he and his partner in obfuscation, Karl Rove, are gob-smacked with horror at what they created.

Have the truly bizarre right wingers thought this through? Have they envisioned what the country would look like? What people’s lives would be reduced to? Of course not, any more than a fundamentalist creationist has thought through the end result of a country where its physicians think that evolution is “just a theory” or its policy-makers think that climate change is “a hoax.”

Anyone who thinks that Obamacare is the key to this movement is being naive. It is merely the cause du jour. If they win this they will move to another issue. If they lose, they will move to another issue. In either case you can count on immigration, abortion, civil rights, voting rights, environmental regulation, the progressive income tax and a host of other causes to line up like stuffed dogs in a carnival game.

They have become true anarchists with no regard for the Constitution. Never before has a political party hijacked the government because they did not like the laws that were passed. Their appeals to the sanctity of the Constitution are empty rhetoric, just like their overt calls for compromise. No one with a dot of understanding of or respect for the Constitution could act this way. No one with any serious concerns about the quality of life in America could act this way. No one with even a dollop of common sense could act this way. It is beyond pathetic.