Political rant: A fair and balanced review of National Review

One of my worst failings is I can’t ignore politics. It isn’t good for me because there are so few good things that happen in that world that lift my spirits. It also isn’t good that I talk with folks about these issues and most of the talk is even more distressing than the actual goings on. But still I soldier on. Recently I engaged an old friend in one of these conversations. I’d known him mainly as a most pleasant neighbor and through a few local political actions and found him to be quite reasonable. He’s pro-environment, sensitive to climate issues and appropriately suspicious of development. So color me surprised when I discovered that he’s way to the right on national issues.

We’re friends so we’ve agreed to disagree about these DC’ish matters and trade pleasantries punctuated with the occasional zap at Ted Cruz from me and one-line zingers about Obamacare from him. Then he sent me an email saying he’d bought me a subscription to National Review! I’m an academic by trade, a scholar, a searcher for truth and understanding and, alas, this means I’m supposed to be open to all points of view, ready to shift opinions, modify held positions and reflect on the reality that is out there … really. I’d read NR from time to time when someone emailed me a piece or in a doctor’s office (why do so many physicians tilt rightward? my daddy was a doctor but he and his friends were somewhere to left of Henry Wallace). But I hadn’t sat down and read an issue all the way through. Now I had to. Curse you my friend. You knew I’d have to do this.

So what did I find? First the writing isn’t bad. These folks can be as lethal in their criticism as the lefties and can be as clever in their presentation. They are, surprisingly, also occasionally pretty funny which burst my bubble that righties are all sphincter and tsk tsk. But, as the intellectual descendants of William F., they should be. But it stopped here. There’s nothing else. Virtually every story, every column, every snippet of news, every review of every book or movie or art display is built around criticism of the left and on attacks of progressivism. Now some of this is fine. You can rant away about supposedly creative performance art that deals with bowel movements without having a political agenda so why bother to bring it in? You can criticize a movie for being banal without condemning it for some hidden social agenda. It is possible to blast a media outlet for errors in a story without assuming that they were motivated by some larger bias.

So I read and I thought and wracked my fair and balanced brain: Does the left do this? I went back and read several issues of the New York Review, The Nation, The New Yorker. Answer: occasionally they do but it’s rare. In fact, so rare that the differences between the two wings are startling. The left criticizes and tells you why. The right merely criticizes. The left lays out plans to resolve problems. The right merely identifies the problems.

Then on to the real political stuff, the articles on Hillary, Obamacare, Benghazi, the IRS (non)scandal, the economy, taxes, immigration, education, the size of government, free-markets and regulatory agencies, Wall Street … etc. etc. etc. … ad nauseum. Now it was getting seriously depressing. I’ve been despairing about the Republican Party for some decades now. It hasn’t been in great shape since Reagan and these days it’s mostly in the crapper. It was shanghaied by the Tea Party dupes who were taken in by the oligarchs and the anti-union bozos, hijacked by the NRA, swept aside by Libertarians (who suddenly stop being pure about freedom when it runs smack into a woman’s right to make a choice, gays to marry or ordinary folks to play a little poker online) and recently has stooped to the likes of Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz to provide intellectual stature.

But despair breeds hope. Somewhere in that morass there have to be serious thinkers, people with ideas, vision, plans for a better tomorrow (tomorrow?). The NR is supposed to be their vehicle so I read on…. Three issues now, cover to cover in my best Diogenes-mode. Is it there? Nope. And this is sad, really and truly sad. I’m not terribly upset about the many articles smacking Hillary around. This is standard fare and all they’re doing is softening her up for ’16. That’s politics and it’s okay. Ditto for attacks on strong lefties like Elizabeth Warren. When you’re out there pushing progressive policy you can (and should) be subject to scrutiny. There’s an awful lot of Catholicism in articles, ads and promotions. Curious but I guess that’s okay. There’s a good bit of Jewishness on the progressive side, especially that coming out of New York.

Alas, that’s all I found. Attacks, criticism, pummeling of positions, assaults on policy, skewering of office holders, damning of the DoJ, the ACA (or “Obamacare” if you prefer). No coherent offerings of alternatives. No ideas. No theory. No analysis. Nothing. Nada. Pathetic.

Obamacare is criticized and that’s fine; it’s been assailed from the left as well. The NR hopes it will eventually be repealed – to be replaced with??? Immigration reform is a topic of some import and the NR isn’t happy about current movements. Their plan is??? Unemployment levels are too high. NR’s suggestions for job growth are??? Education is in deep trouble. The right’s answer is??? Climate change is coming no matter what your beliefs are (are you listening Rushbo?). The Republican proposals are??? And so it goes for terrorism, foreign policy, the justice system, the dysfunctional congress, poverty, obesity, race relations, civil rights … etc.

The barest flickerings of serious thought are those that turn on issues of the size of government, the role of regulatory agencies and economic policy. The problems with the positions the NR takes and the legislation they favor is that they are all based on outdated and demonstrably unworkable notions dredged up from a non-existent past. Big governments aren’t inherently bad or dysfunctional and saying it over and over won’t make it so. Governments run scores of things better than private firms. The VA, Social Security, Medicare are all managed well and cheaper than comparable private corporations. When you don’t have to turn a profit it makes a big difference.

Regulations are essential. Even the briefest scan of history shows this. No regulations on building in Haiti and the whole freaking country collapses in a modest earthquake. No safety regulations in place and hundreds of workers die in a fire in India. No control over a demolition site and five people die when a building collapses in Philadelphia. The US repeals Glass-Steagall (thanks to the banks and a willing Democrat in Bubba) and ’08 happens (and don’t try to tell me it was really Fanny and Freddie) while up in Canada the crisis is weathered and over in less than two years. Free-market systems do not work, have never worked and any psychologist who’s looked at the cognitive and emotional elements in human decision-making can tell you why. There’s a reason why two psychologists (Herb Simon and Daniel Kahneman) have won the Nobel in economics.

And, lastly, the right and NR’s economic policies are nothing short of embarrassing. Austerity is such a terrible idea that even many conservative economists have acknowledged it. Worries over the deficit are silly when you’re in a recession. Even Romney knew this. He let slip that “everyone knows you can’t cut spending in a recession” in an interview – then his handlers put the kibosh on any more such revelatory statements. Regressive tax policies are just awful for everyone but the hyper-wealthy. For reasons mysterious the editors and writers of NR still don’t seem to grasp Keynesean theory. For reasons equally mysterious they haven’t grasped the dangers of economic disparity. And for the life of me, I cannot fathom how anyone cannot be distressed by the fact that 90% of the population has seen their financial position and quality of life decline in the past thirty years while the top 1% now control a staggering 42% of the nation’s wealth, the next 19% control 54% and the remaining 80% a pathetic 4%. The NR appears not to be.

Sad. I suspect the reason for this lack of innovative ideas, decent theory, clever programs or creativity in policy is simply because the brand is broken. There is nothing there to promote. All that is left is to criticize and even there they don’t it very well. It fits with what’s been going on in DC since ’09. The GOP offers nothing, no legislation, no programs, no solutions to problems. But they do find time to offer 37 repeals of Obamacare, to filibuster countless bills for no other reason than the Democrats offered them, block scores of appointments to important government posts and judicial positions and hope the economy crumbles so they can blame the Black Dude in the White House.

Now I’m stuck with a year’s worth of magazines arriving in my mailbox. More trees to the blade. I wonder if they use recycled paper?

Baddest bad beat

Played poker for six hours yesterday. Heard at least a baker’s dozen of bad beat stories. I understand, I do. Cooler’s hurt, rivered two-outers strip layers off your soul, donkeys who hit runner-runner can drive you bat shit. But the garden variety bad beat is just that, a garden variety bad beat. They will happen, have to happen and will happen with statistically determinable regularity. If it’s a two-outer that sent you stoop-shouldered into the dark cruel night you can be certain that they will crush you one of out of 23 times. The four-outer that turns the losing two-pair into a boat will defang you about twice as often.

But some bad beats are self-inflicted. The worst I ever saw was one of these.

Two guys, I have no idea what their names were so let’s call ‘em Ching and Gerry. Ching was a young Asian kid with shades, spiky hair and leaked aggression out of every pore. He’d been playing off and on at our room and had a lot of guys intimidated. Gerry was a thirty-something regular in the room. He played a decent game, lost more than he won but won enough to keep coming back. The game was no-limit hold ‘em with $5 - $5 blinds and a $1500 max buy-in.

Ching was sitting on Gerry’s right but that didn’t seem to matter much ‘cause Gerry had no idea how to handle him. He was getting under Gerry’s skin, seriously. He was making pre-emptive raises of almost every hand that got checked around to him. Re-raising Gerry every chance he had and would push the hell out of almost every hand he played. He was pressuring everyone – but Gerry seemed to think he was targeting him – and he let him know it. First, it was the whining like, “How come you’re in every pot I’m in?” – without realizing that he was in almost every pot. Then it moved to “I haven’t seen one free big blind since you sat your sorry ass in that chair.” Then on to “You are just one lucky turkey, and I’m going to take every one of those freakin’ chips.” The kid just kept smiling and raising.

Gerry was down close to a dime when “the hand” happened. He had just reloaded and had about $1,200 in front of him. Ching had him covered, way covered. They were in the blinds and, predictably Ching made it $40 to go when it got folded around. Gerry just looked at him, snarled something incomprehensible and called. The flop was a mostly ragged J♦, 9♥, 4♥. Ching pushed out a stack of redbirds. Gerry called. The turn was the 5♥. Ching led for $250. Gerry squirmed, screwed up his face and called.

The river was the 2♥. Ching shoved. Gerry went into the tank – but not silently. He muttered about the “little creep,” which he had taken to calling the kid when he couldn’t get a rise out of him with less earthy insults; he looked over at him but got nothing back but a grin and his own face reflected in the lizard shades; he muttered some more, cussed him out some more and then actually apologized to the table for taking so long. Then he tried the oh-so-tired gambit of running off hands the kid could have… “Did you really hit a flush on the end? Did you really bet all the way with a freakin’ draw? An overpair? A big jack? Air? AIR?”

Finally, someone called ‘time’ and Gerry hunkered down for one last think. With maybe ten seconds left he looked up, pushed all his chips out and said, “I am so fucking sick of getting pushed around by you. I call.”

“Nice call, I missed,” said Ching – the first words out of his mouth since he sat down. Gerry turned up Q♠, J♠. The dealer started to push the pot to Gerry and asked him to move his chips closer so she could get a count. Gerry, clearly feeling triumphant, like all those warnings to felt the kid have been fulfilled, looked at her and said pointing at Ching’s cards, “I want to see that hand.”

Now in the normal world of poker the dealer will do the dealer’s “thing” here. She will ask Ching to drop his cards, take them, tap them twice on the felt to declare the hand dead and turn them over. But Ching still had them in his hand. He looked at Gerry, said, “No problem, man,” and turned over T♣, 8♥, stared at them and blurted out “Holy shit, I hit the flush.”

The table froze. Gerry looked like someone just shot him as she pushed the twenty-four hundred rutabagas to “The Kid.”

Response to Dalla's latest rant

The following was inspired by a wonderful, angry and, alas, somewhat misplaced rant by my friend and intellectual sparring partner, Nolan Dalla. It can be found here, and should be read before continuing.

Believing in a unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable mystical entity is, on the face of it, absurd. The notion that there is some transcendent character, one we call God (though there are scores of names for him/her found around the globe), who has been here forever, who is omniscient and all-powerful, who created us and/or our planet and oversees current events is just weird. So here, count me on the side of Lord Dalla.

The notion, entertained by Nick in his interesting comment, that because science hasn’t figured out what was before the big bang or that we do not yet understand the biochemical mechanisms that allowed self-replicating organic forms to emerge surely shouldn’t lead us to conclude that these things must be due to God. Appealing to an unknowable entity to answer scientific questions is, well, a cop-out. And the watch on the beach gambit has long been put to rest.

First, science isn’t the game of the known. It is the game of the unknown. It is the not knowing of things that makes the process go. As someone who spent a half-century as a cognitive scientist studying the human mind I can tell you that the mystery is where the magic is, where the joy of discovery lurks. If we knew all the answers we’d be done. It’d be finished. We’d all just go to the seashore and drink beer. All good scientific discoveries open more unknowns than they answer.

Second, I’d like to ask believers to ask some questions, ones I think all religious people should ask themselves. If you have and are still a believer, that’s fine. But do ask.

Here’s one: what was here before God? If you answer by saying God was always here then I want to know why you find it difficult to think that matter, space and time were always here. Or that our universe is but one among many or that it is a single interation in an infinite cycle of big bang followed by big bang.

Here’s another: where did God come from? He had to come from somewhere, right? Just like the universe had to come from somewhere. If you answer that we don’t know the answer and therefore choose to merely have faith, that’s fine. Just ask.  

Let’s try one more: Why would our God care about us? Why would he give a rat’s ass about a cinder-speck of a planet whirling around a perfectly boring star in just one of billions (yes, that’s right billions) of galaxies each of which contains billions of stars? I mean, talk about hubris! If your answer is that he’s taking care of all the others too, that’s fine. Just think about it.

And just one more here: Why would he/she have waited four billion years to craft the first hominids and then another 150 thousand or so to allow Homo sapiens to emerge and then another couple of tens of thousands before he ‘gave us his first born son?” If you think that he’s working on some grand plan here, that’s fine. But ask.

Now, back to Nolan. Look man, what you’re missing is what I tried to get across in my earlier riposte. Religion is easy, atheism is hard. Belief in the transcendental is a walk in the park, doing science is hard. Accepting the existence of mystical creatures with over-arching powers is a piece of cake; carving out an understanding of life without the support of such a belief system is hard.

And, to give Nick his due, he’s got more than a few good points to make. None of them have any theological or ontological merit but they have a good bit of psychological and sociological merit. As noted in my previous rant on evolution (scroll down for it), we know that there are deep reasons why religion and religious belief systems are universal, found in all human societies. Some of them go back to basic mechanisms like agency detection and kinship systems but others derive from the importance of these commonly held beliefs to the communities of persons who hold them.

Yes, people pray and it does no good. Interestingly, back in the late 1800s Sir Francis Galton did the first empirical study of the efficacy of prayer. It had none. But it is satisfying. It is satisfying like a chant is to a group of mystics or the ritual rocking of Jews davening or the aimless crossing of oneself before stepping into the batter’s box. It’s part of one’s upbringing. It’s like borscht for dinner on a cold night in the Urals, a bowl of dahl for lentil lovers in India, the clicking of chopsticks at a meal in Hunan. It becomes part of one’s culture, of one’s daily life. You will not improve the lives of believers or diminish their suffering by using logic or history or science or any other rhetorical or empirical device to separate them from their rituals, their beliefs. Many religious people ultimately move away from their beliefs, many pull the mantle of agnosticism about their shoulders, others embrace atheism — but they do it by asking themselves questions and finding that the answers they had don’t satisfy any more.

Nick, one more thing: What intrigues me about your position is your seeming openness to alternatives. One of the things about many religious people is that they assume theirs is the only true faith and, importantly, that their voyage of discovery was the only true path. You seem not to do this and I applaud. When we have so many variations on belief systems, formal religious doctrines, texts, rituals, creation myths, etc. it forces us to conclude that they cannot all be right. If they cannot all be right it would it laughably unlikely that exactly one of them would be. So, therefore, none of them are. If none are then there are only two ways to resolve this dilemma:

1. abandon religion, all religion,  for it is silly and wrong
2. see one’s religion, not as some precious set of truths but a framework within which to live a good life, reduce suffering, embrace others, support the needy and welcome diversity – while acknowledging that all these things can be done in the absence of the belief.

Finally, Bruno: Religion didn’t begin as you characterize it. There’s an awful lot of research on this. It goes back to a cluster of perceptual, cognitive, social and emotional mechanisms that have a long evolutionary history in our (and other) species. Scroll down for a quick overview of some of it.

Okay, done now….. 

Review of "Poker, Life and Other Confusing Things"

My lastest book was just reviewed in Fun ‘N’ Games magazine. Unless you’re one of the regular customers on Gold Transportation’s junkets to various gambling centers like Atlantic City you won’t have seen this. But the editor and publisher Ed Gallo sent me a copy of his review. I kinda like it and Ed said I could reproduce it here….. so here it is.

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Poker, as Reber notes, is a people game played with cards for money. He certainly isn’t the first to say this but he is the first to take apart that “people” element in a totally new way. Reber is unique. As he puts it, “I’ve lived two parallel lives. In one I am a semi-degenerate gambler, a poker junkie and horse player; in the other, a scientist specializing in cognitive psychology and related topics in the neurosciences, the origins of consciousness and the philosophy of mind.”

He’s serious. He’s the author of two major books on gambling, final-tabled major tournaments, has two WSOP money finishes and has been a winning cash game player for decades. He is also a distinguished scientist who held an endowed chair in the City University of New York and has been elected Fellow of such prestigious organizations as the Association for Psychological Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Fulbright Foundation.

These two parallel lives give him a special perspective. In this book he takes what is known about human psychology and uses it to gain insight into poker and, with a gentle twist, takes what we know about poker and uses that to provide further understanding of the human condition.

In one of my favorite chapters, he takes a look at what goes on in the mind of a poker player who’s been running good, hitting cards and piling up the chips. We all know how much fun this is but what I’ve never seen before is Reber’s analysis of what this run of good fortune does to the player’s head, what impact it has on the others at the table and, intriguingly, what an attentive player can do to exploit this situation.

The word “belief” appears in chapter after chapter, particularly those that explode myths about poker. In the chapter cryptically titled “Locus of Control” he examines the belief patterns that long-term winning players have that differ from those whose money they are winning. In the even more oddly titled “Superstitions, Pigeons and Poker Players” he peels back the irrational beliefs that so many players have and cleverly shows how these beliefs mirror the very ones that other animals (like pigeons) have.

Luck gets taken apart from every conceivable angle. It is explored in the context of randomness, statistical regression, timing and rhythm and all of it wrapped around the key notion that it is a player’s belief in the role of luck that is the dominant element.

Do you want to know why sometimes it is so hard to get up from a poker game and go home? Reber explains it (spoiler alert: it’s dopamine, a neurotransmitter). Do you want to understand why even the very best poker players can end up as life-time losers? As Reber shows, playing poker professionally is psychologically far more complex than merely being a very good poker player. There are life-issues here involving risk aversion, long-term commitment, friendships, physical well-being and many others that either support or overwhelm poker skills.

He also introduces us to a crazy quilt collection of characters who populate the world of poker. My favorites are two who made an impact on Reber, “Harry,” a bookie and one of his life-long friends and “Charlie,” whose short afternoon at his table changed the lives of everyone lucky enough to be there that day.

Finally, for the celebrity-sighting crowd, Reber puts some of the game’s best known players “on the couch,” including Stuey Ungar, Phil Ivey, Mike Matusow, Phil Hellmuth and one really crazy dude, Roy “The Boy” Brindley.

This book is just totally different from anything else I’ve seen. In the Preface, Reber tells us what he’s up to. He says it best:

“Poker is a fascinating mirror of life and shares the psychological burdens…. If threatened we are prone to counterattack. If stressed we often lose our deliberative abilities…. We pride ourselves on rationality but the ascension of our species works against it. When things look bleak, we reach for gods and angels, faces in the clouds, mystical rustling in the bushes…. It is not easy to overcome these tendencies…. They are found everywhere and penetrate all the even mildly interesting things we do – and that includes playing complex and intensely competitive games like poker. They are also the reason why is it such a devilishly hard game to master. Poker is a microcosm of life precisely because it is the most intellectually complex, emotionally rich, and social game we’ve ever invented.”

Indeed it is and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Hot hands: You gotta believe!

The NBA playoffs are heating up (and The Heat are at 1 to freakin’ 3 which, in my book, is an awful bet but what do I know?) and sports fans everywhere start hearing about the “hot hands” phenomenon. Who’s “hot?” What player can carry his team to the championship? Who’s playing way above the norm at this critical time of the year?

This topic actually pops up everywhere. Hockey goalies seem unbeatable – they just know where the puck is heading and stop anything thrown at them. Quarterbacks are on fire – pass after pass finds down-field receivers clean in stride. But it’s in basketball that the effect is most prominent. It’s tough to miss those moments where a player can seemingly do no wrong. He’s in a state of grace, on fire, cannot miss. He’s draining 22 footers like they were layups, nailing ‘em from the corners, all net from the top of the key.

Are these moments real? That is, real in the sense that when they occur they are mathematically or metaphysically special? I’m not trying to split hairs; this is a serious question. When an all-pro quarterback seems to be in that ‘zone’ is he really in a zone or is this just the kind of performance we expect to see on a statistically determinable basis? When a guy drains 7 of 8 from downtown is this something special, something transcendental or merely an event that will pop up with predictable frequency?

People who play sports or follow them with any passion swear these effects are real. Basketball coaches issue instructions: “Get Joey the ball; he’s got the ‘hot hand’.” Baseball managers manipulate their lineups to get the guy with the ‘hot bat’ an extra turn at the plate. Golfers enter extra tournaments when they think that they’re ‘striking the ball’ good. Poker pros play more hours or enter more events when they’re ‘running good.’ But is there really a hot hands phenomenon? Are bats really hot? Do poker players really run good? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

The psychologist Amos Tversky took a look at this issue some years back. He reasoned that if Joey really had a hot hand, then we should see a statistically aberrant performance, one where he made more shots with more regularity than his norm. So Tversky analyzed every shot taken by several dozen NBA basketball players over a full year looking for evidence of a hot hands effect. He found little. Players got ‘hot’ about as often as a random number generator got ‘hot.’

If Joey’s a 42% shooter, we expect to see runs of shots made and shots missed – and we can calculate just how long they should be, distributed over the full year. If another player makes 47% of his shots we should see a different pattern but one consistent with his level of skill. And this is what Tversky found. Sure, there were occasions where Joey hit nine in a row and seemed to be ablaze for an entire half. But these rushes happened about as often as we would expect given that Joey is, overall, a good player who makes a tad better than forty percent of his shots from the floor. So, no hot hands.

Other psychologists did similar analyses in a host of sports and found pretty much the same thing. Quarterbacks got hot about as often as their long term statistics suggest they should. Sure an all-pro like Tom Brady seems to have the hot hand more often than a journeyman backup but, statistically speaking, he should.

But as usually happens in science, when a topic is interesting people do deeper analyses. Follow-up studies suggested that there might be something that Tversky missed. Long runs of baskets or completed passes or shutouts in hockey were occurring more often than one might expect, statistically speaking. But, and here’s the fun part, it wasn’t clear what was causing them. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to tease apart a real hot hands moment from the belief that others have that one is occurring because the latter can produce the former.

If Joey seems to be on fire and if his team mates believe he’s got the hot hand, their behavior changes. They start setting effective picks, trapping opponents allowing him to get free, passing to him in optimal spots on the court. The likelihood of Joey continuing to make shots goes up and his stats defy expectations.

Do we want to conclude that Joey really had a hot hand or that everyone else, by virtue of their beliefs, changed how they play so that it looked like he did? If the hot hands effect is real it’s likely based on a conspiracy of beliefs of the participants.

I like Miami but not at 1-3, no matter how ‘hot’ LeBron is….