Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime quantitative trader, economist, expat, EA, artist, educator, and game developer—writes on topics of int­erest.

Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.
games, figgie, poker, teaching

Editor's note: Somewhat after I posted this on my own blog, Max Chiswick cornered me at a conference 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 running a beta test for a course on making AIs to play poker and other games. The course is a synthesis of our respective theories of pedagogy re: games, and you can read more here. 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

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October 24 Bucket o' Links: Really Awesome Things Edition
solstice, harvard, games, links, physics, effective altruism

This week's links are related by all being really aweseome, or...something? I should really have words with the version of me that comes up with BoL titles at some point.

In any case, this week has a lot of things I'm planning to write more about soon -- namely, 3 (after I see it in theaters), 4 (tomorrow), 5 (in November), and 6 (at some point); look for them on this blog!

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The only thing I have to say about #GamerGate is: Felicia Day, who is a person you know of if you were a nerd who grew up with the internet, has a really nice post on her own blog entitled "The Only Thing I Have to Say about Gamer Gate". For those of you less plugged into the internet gaming community, #GamerGate is more or less a whole lot of uproar by some sexist gamers who are angry that it's not okay in this day and age to be a sexist gamer. Writes Day:

"I have not said many public things about Gamer Gate. I hav tried to leave it alone, aside from a few @ replies on Twitter that journalists have decided to use in their articles, siding me against the hashtag. Why have I remained mostly silent?

Self-protection and fear.

...

HOW SICK IS THAT?"

More at her blog; I'm not going to steal her thunder.

Epilogue: After some trolls, in response to her post, issued public threats against Day and published her address, phone number, and other personal information online, she wrote on Facebook:

I posted this essay yesterday afternoon on Tumblr. Yes, personal information was leaked shortly after, but the

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