LW - Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one. by rossry

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one., published by rossry on July 9, 2024 on LessWrong.
Editor's note: Somewhat after I posted this on my own blog, Max Chiswick cornered me at LessOnline / Manifest and gave me a whole new perspective on this topic. I now believe that there is a way to use poker to sharpen epistemics that works dramatically better than anything I had been considering. I hope to write it up - together with Max - when I have time.
Anyway, I'm still happy to keep this post around as a record of my first thoughts on the matter, and because it's better than nothing in the time before Max and I get around to writing up our joint second thoughts.
As an epilogue to this story, Max and I are now running a beta test for a course on making AIs to play poker and other games. The course will a synthesis of our respective theories of pedagogy re: games, and you can read more here or in the comments. The beta will run July 15-August 15, in-person in SF, and will be free but with limited signups.
Some trading firms are driven by good decisions made by humans. (Some aren't, but we can set those aside. This post is about the ones that are.) Humans don't make better-than-average-quality decisions by default, so the better class of intellectually-driven quantitative trading firm realizes that they are in the business of training humans to make better decisions.
(The second-best class of firm contents themselves with merely selecting talent.) Some firms, famously, use poker to teach traders about decision making under uncertainty.
First, the case for poker-as-educational-tool: You have to make decisions. (Goodbye, Candy Land.) You have to make them under uncertainty. (Goodbye, chess.) If you want to win against smart competition, you have to reverse-engineer the state of your competitors' uncertainty from their decisions, in order to make better decisions yourself. (Goodbye, blackjack.)
It's the last of these that is the rarest among games. In Camel Up - which is a great game for sharpening certain skills - you place bets and make trades on the outcome of a Candy Land-style camel race. Whether you should take one coin for sure or risk one to win five if the red camel holds the lead for another round... Turn after turn, you have to make these calculations and decisions under uncertainty.
But there's no meaningful edge in scrutinizing your opponent's decision to pick the red camel. If they were right about the probabilities, you shouldn't have expected differently. And if they're wrong, it means they made a mistake, not that they know a secret about red camels.
Poker is different. Your decision is rarely dictated by the probabilities alone. Even if you draw the worst possible card, you can win if your opponent has been bluffing and has even worse - or if your next action convinces them that they should fold a hand that would have beaten yours. If you only play the odds that you see, and not the odds you see your opponent showing you, you will on average lose.
So as you grind and grind at poker, first you learn probabilities and how they should affect your decisions, then you learn to see what others' decisions imply about what they see, and then you can work on changing your decisions to avoid leaking what you know to the other players that are watching you. Or so I'm told. I would not describe myself as a particularly skilled poker player. I certainly have not ground and ground and ground.
Here's the thing, though: If you are a trading firm and you want to teach traders about making decisions uncertainty, it's not enough that poker teaches it. Nor is it enough that poker, if you grind for thousands of hours, can teach quite a lot of it. A quantitative trading firm is primarily a socialist collective run for the benefit of its workers, but it...