[FRIAM] anthropological observations

Sat Apr 18 15:58:32 EDT 2020

If, over his career, Nate's site gives a 2/3 vs 1/3 split 1,000 ti mes, and
something near 333 times the 1/3 split wins, I think he gets to declare
himself accurate.

Similarly, a modern poker pro isn't trying to guess what the opponent has.
The modern player is trying to put the opponent on a spread of possible
hands under the circumstances. The outcome of any given hand doesn't
matter, and there is an expected amount of variance in performance even
under a game-theoretic perfect strategy. The question is whether the
strategy pays out in the long run, and whether the player has a deep enough
bankroll (in comparison to the stakes they are playing at) to ride out the
variance. If you think the pro is doing something else, you probably are
still a very long way from getting to that level.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 2:32 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, Eric [Charles],
>
>
>
> What exactly were the *practicial* consequences of declaring that Hillary
> was “probably” going to win the election or that a full house was probably
> going to win the pot given she lost and the dealer held a strait flush?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Eric Charles
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 18, 2020 12:06 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] anthropological observations
>
>
>
> -------- Nick says --------- Nate constantly says that making such
> predictions is, strictly speaking, not his job.  As long as what happens
> falls within the error of his prediction, he feels justified in having made
> it.   He will say things like, "actually we were right."  I would prefer
> him to say, "Actually we were wrong, *but I would make the same
> prediction under the same circumstances the next time.”  *In other words,
> the right procedure produced, on this occasion, a wrong result.
> -----------------
>
>
>
> Well... so this connects a lot with poker, which I am in the process of
> teaching the 10 year old... If I recall, Nate was giving Trump a 1/3 chance
> of victory, which was much higher than most of the other models at the
> time. You can hardly fault someone because something happened that they
> said would happen 2/3 of the time.
>
>
>
> If a poker player has a model that predicts a given play to be the best
> option, because it will work 2/3 of the time, and this one time it doesn't
> work, that isn't grounds to say the model failed.
>
>
>
>  YOU want the modelers to have models that rarely give anything close to
> even odds. So do I, so I'm sympathetic. But the modeler might prefer a more
> honest model, that includes more uncertainty, for a wide variety of
> reasons.
>
>
> -----------
>
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
>
> American University - Adjunct Instructor
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:17 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think it's interesting that you seemed to have *flipped* your thinking
> within the same post. You restate my point about conceptual metaphors by
> saying models/computation merely *justifies* decisions/rhetoric. Then a few
> paragraphs later, you suggest that's conflating language with thought.
>
> My diatribe to Nick was that he *uses* metaphors/models simply to impute
> his conceptual structure onto Nate. Nick's decision is already made and he
> wants Nate's work to justify it. And the way he *imputes* his conceptual
> structure into Nate's work is through the sloppy use of metaphor. Then when
> Nate tells Nick (indirectly) that Nick's wrong about what Nate's done, Nick
> rejects Nate's objection.
>
> I'm picking on Nick, of course. We all do it. I wish we all did it much
> less.
>
> On 4/18/20 6:14 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> > But frankly as often as not, I saw
> > them use our work to *justify* the decision they had already made or
> > were leaning heavily toward, *apparently* based on larger strategic
> > biases.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > As for your gut-level (and often well articulated) mistrust of
> > "metaphorical thinking",  you may conflate a belief (such as mine) that
> > language is metaphorical at it's base with being a "metaphorical
> > thinker".    Metaphor gets a bad rap/rep perhaps because of the
> > "metaphorical license" often taken in creative arts (albeit for a
> > different and possibly higher purpose).
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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