I except poker because, while there is nontrivial discussion of it here and especially on Hacker News, I don’t think poker is strongly associated with nerds. My gut impression is that poker as a hobby is still predominantly non-nerds. Hence, it’s the only entry that was not a nerd hobby.
(I would agree that anime is nothing special for rationality. This includes the many science fiction anime.)
I always figured the good poker players were all nerds, and the folk view of poker as this manly dominance contest of nerves etc just provided an endless stream of prey for them. I used to play Magic: The Gathering and read MTG blogs etc, and the pros drifted into poker because there was more money in it.
Poker, like other games of hidden information such as MTG, very strongly rewards rationality because it presses upon an important bias. Few people understand that the right play is the one that maximises your chances of winning given your information, not the one that will win given all the information.
Most people just can’t accept this. When they make the right bet and lose it messes them up—they start thinking of what they should’ve done differently, and their play diverges from the correct line. They can’t accept that they played correctly. The same thing happens when they make an incorrect play that happens to win.
Well, for example, anime is not included, because when I asked Eliezer, he apparently didn’t think it offered any rationality lessons.
Why do you make an exception for poker? Is there anything else you think should be on the list?
I except poker because, while there is nontrivial discussion of it here and especially on Hacker News, I don’t think poker is strongly associated with nerds. My gut impression is that poker as a hobby is still predominantly non-nerds. Hence, it’s the only entry that was not a nerd hobby.
(I would agree that anime is nothing special for rationality. This includes the many science fiction anime.)
I always figured the good poker players were all nerds, and the folk view of poker as this manly dominance contest of nerves etc just provided an endless stream of prey for them. I used to play Magic: The Gathering and read MTG blogs etc, and the pros drifted into poker because there was more money in it.
Poker, like other games of hidden information such as MTG, very strongly rewards rationality because it presses upon an important bias. Few people understand that the right play is the one that maximises your chances of winning given your information, not the one that will win given all the information.
Most people just can’t accept this. When they make the right bet and lose it messes them up—they start thinking of what they should’ve done differently, and their play diverges from the correct line. They can’t accept that they played correctly. The same thing happens when they make an incorrect play that happens to win.