It'll probably take at least a week to get those bad songs out of my head, but calli is such a great poster (I'll probably think of his "don't show up too early for an interview" posts every time I interview somebody for a long time!) that I'll get over it.

Anyway, seems okay with me to merge the LC threads, lots of people post in both. Could probably merge the forums in fact, I've seen like one question about 2/4 in the last year or so, and that ended up being an interesting thread about BRM and std deviation.

Nope, don't know if our hours overlapped, but I know someone who played with him.

Steered well clear of that inevitable mess. This is what happens when you invite a bunch of politicians and military personnel to run a scientific company.

I interviewed at a few other startups with similar warning signs, too - CEO named as inventor on too many scientific patents, unwillingness to present scientific data to people qualified to evaluate, secrecy primarily enforced by legal means (abnormal CDAs, threatened lawsuits, etc.) rather than secondarily.

^^ Smart man. You're a mensch, Calli. I'd be interested to know who you're working for these days, and more importantly, when can I invest.

Last night, I had a hand that went like this:



Apparently, the plastic bag held the KQo dealt to me in the SB.

3 year plan: you crush 30/60, I crush brain cancer, and then you can quit poker and invest your bankroll in the newly formed Callipygian Pharmaceuticals.

My hippy Austin-living mother-in-law believes that all cancer is already cured and Big Pharma is withholding said cure to bolster profits. Thus, your cure will not be given to the public.

If I confirm this, my co-conspirators will kill me.

Sounds like a plan, but we might have to talk about the name. Unless you also plan to invent a drug that causes well-rounded buttocks.

Is it remotely worth it to try to discuss the improbability of this, or should I just nod and ask when she's going to head to the thrift stores with my wife?

She also believes that "people who don't want to vaccinate their children have a valid point, you just don't know...". I responded to that with a flat "those people should be jailed for endangering their own children and others." Thus, I could already just be in the pro-Big Pharma bin with her.

Table 15 Pharmaceuticals

The problem with conspiracy theories is that when contradictory evidence is brought up, the conspiracy expands to include it.

I usually make an on the fly decision whether or not to engage a scientific conspiracy discussion (evolution, global warming, genetically modified foods, vaccines) depending on the perceived likeliness that scientific evidence will be treated as evidence. Satan put fossils in the ground to test our faith? Not gonna engage. Only people who know no science can be trusted to talk about science? Not gonna engage. Corn was genetically homogeneous and perfect in a pre-industrial age? Not gonna engage. But if they're simply ignorant of the science, I'll try to explain as best as I can and I'll be frank about when Dawkins or Hansen or Monsanto has grossly overreached.

Faith > science

Then, in 5000 BC, a mere 1000 years after the creation of Earth, the human-dinosaur treaty fell apart, and they drove the dinosaurs underground. And that's where fossils come from

I have never heard of Satan putting fossils in the ground...that's awesome!

A "cure" for cancer is a myth. There will be effective treatments for multiple forms of cancer, but there's never gonna exist some panacea to either prevent or cure cancer... unless, of course, we develop/discover an anti-aging gene that can be introduced into our genome.

So Big Pharma- and Calli's livelihood- should remain in good shape for the foreseeable future.

Totally.
Big difference between the two, science actually works while you always have to change its interpretation with religion because it never works.

Complete derail from whatever you guys are talking about, but I am pretty skeptical of a lot of "sciences". The problem with the scientific method is that people try to apply it to human action, which does not make sense.

In the physical sciences, you can observe phenomena to develop a hypothesis which you then try to disprove by experimentation. And when you can't, and no one else can, it become a theory or ultimately, a law.

With human action, you do not need to try to discover the laws of human nature because we all inherently understand human nature. We all experience being a human and so the applicable laws are already known. The correct way to study the human sciences is to try to apply the laws that we already know and then use logical deduction to explain things and figure them out.

An additional problem is that human systems are extraordinarily complex. It is pretty much impossible to control human conditions to a degree that would completely eliminate outside influence from the experiment you are trying to observe.

But most people studying the human sciences today do not understand this and so they try and apply some convolution of the scientific method and often arrive at faulty conclusions.

So I generally agree with science when it comes to things like physics, biology, geology, etc. But I have a lot of disagreements with the established academics when it comes to things like psychology, history, sociology and economics.

Imagine if you treated poker with the back-to-front scientific method approach. "He bet. My hypothesis is that he bet because he has a strong hand. I shall now call him the next 100 times to see if I can disprove my hypothesis."

To me, this makes as much sense as trying to explain economics by looking at historical trends.

Prove we're all human

I think our "understanding" of the laws of human nature are commensurate with our understanding of the synaptic connections of the human brain. So many possibilities, so little real knowledge.

I don't agree that we have any meaningful understanding of the "applicable laws" that govern human behavior.

I'm a big fan of behavioral economics. You can use modern math/statistics to learn things about "the universe". It probably won't boil down to a law. Honestly, physical sciences are basically done with laws -- think Newton's Law of Gravity, which was wrong.
Your example is proof that a poorly constructed experiment will yield silly results. Let's say you were buddies with Josem and could get your mitts on all of the billions of pokerstars hands ever played. You might be able to do some deep research into poker ideas. Or not, because maybe online poker is different.
The state of the art in econ is a randomized trial with a big sample.

The real answer is that the soft sciences are more difficult than the hard ones when it comes to getting to "concrete" results. Or not, I mean state of the art physics is grappling with a math construct that nobody can prove/disprove applies to the real world (string theory). You should check out the freakenomics podcast. They're entertaining. There is a lot about behavioral economics. Way more fun than studying homoeconomicus.(strange that the correct spelling hit the nsfw filter)

Yeabut you gotta admit that if there was a Newton's Law of Poker that could be used in games below 100/200, you'd crush the game. (Maybe even 1k/2k cause nobody's really all that good at GTO poker.)

Hehehe. He said **** economics

There was a company called Sirtris, which I see now has been absorbed into GVK, that was working on anti-aging drugs that worked through HDAC inhibition. Not 100% sure what the status of the trials are/were, but it was kind of funny to speculate how you'd design a clinical trial to prove it made you live longer.

Yeah, poker was a pretty bad example. There is definitely a scientific/mathematical part of the game in addition to a human element.

We can't fully explain the mechanism by which thought occurs but we understand the result of that mechanism which manifests itself as the human experience.

For example, in economics the most basic rule is that people have unlimited desires and will take action that they think will achieve those desires which they value the highest. These values change from person to person and are continuously changing even for the same person, but this general rule is always applicable and all other economic theories should be derived from this basic assumption.