[FRIAM] observability and randomness

[∄ uǝlƃ]

You're argument took a very cool turn from the distribution of inheritance actions to the distribution of cards and (conditional) distributions of playing the hand. I think you're right to call out the collective/systemic landscape vs. the individual's wiggle inside it (if that wiggle exists at all).

At the last Zoom meeting, I argued that one can't (credibly) be proud of something one had no hand in. E.g. being proud of your eye color or something John Locke or Thomas Paine said umpteen million years ago. Someone interrupted another discussant later to shout out "What about being ashamed? Can you be ashamed of something you had no hand in?" I didn't answer because he was interrupting someone else. But my answer is "Yes", you can be ashamed of something you had no hand in. The reason I answer that way is because shame (and yes SteveS, guilt too) are triggers for improvement, change, evolution. Pride is inherently conservative, whereas shame is inherently progressive. Pride is backward looking and shame is forward looking.

So, as long as we're assuming there is *some* tiny bit of wiggle we might have some control over, the direction of the arrow of time matters. And that's what allows one to argue for actions like reparations as well as adjusting one's behavior over *iterated* poker games. As I argued with Jon, the iteration (and approximating similarity measures for successive conditions) matters. Whatever little wiggle there is *might* need iteration to build up, in contrast to a typical sense of "free will" where people think they have huge, game-changing options at every instant.

On 6/29/20 5:53 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> Okay, so we touch on "free will" as the buttress of personal moral responsibility, but how about the opposite side of the coin, as in I chose to keep those millions in the hedge fund, therefore I deserve all the returns that my investment earned, no one else can have any of it, it's mine!  And if great-great-great-grand-dad earned all of his in the slave trade, so what, that was perfectly respectable business back then, no blot on the wealth he left us from the lives it destroyed.  So the doctrine of free will simultaneously punishes the poor and rewards the rich for making equally no-brainer decisions, that's just the way the world is.
> 
> This came up in recent reviews of Maria Konnikova's new book, The Biggest Bluff, which is largely a meditation on Chance and Necessity, to recall another best-seller.  Her description of how to be a high stakes poker player sounds a lot like Glen's construction on how free will might work, hours spent watching video of other high stakes players, disciplining oneself to not take credit for the strokes of luck that fall your way, nor to take the blame for the strokes that fall the other way.  Riding the edge of what you can effect, learning to discriminate, disdaining to be distracted by that which you cannot control.  
> 
> Are poker games deterministic?  Can you learn to play better poker?


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