Can you go into further detail about your claims on prayer? Specifically, how do you know its great? Why is it nonsensical if our daily lives are rooted in conflict? Why do you think prayer will be improved if there is less conflict in daily lives? Is there anything else I can do besides reducing the level of conflict in my daily life in order to make prayer more sensible.

we are talking about praying for world peace, praying shows they care, but if the problem is that no one is doing anything about war, in their daily lives, then praying is hypocritical. To me that would make no sense to do then.

Here is an interesting paper that attempts to give a more robust account of a model agent that would use a superrationalistic approach in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma.

Unpossible. Everyone knows game theorists only work on waging war.

and solving LHE

Same thing.

The paper is over my head obv, but I didn't get the impression they were looking for peace. Seems clear though that high level game thoery is a precursor to AI. Maybe we know that already.

I don't find this all funny though. Take a look at Syria with the largest supply of Chemical weapons in middle east. If they deploy those will you just not care? I think not caring is why these things happen. I don't think its because of 'evil', I think its soley ignorance.


Not sure if this is what you meant, but ya solving LHE, the paper you posted (maybe), and war are all the same thing.

When you take game theory and use it together, to mutually achieve a desired result, thats a step towards peace. Not sure why people can't see that here.

The question still stands though, no one has answered, would you change your direction in poker if it was shown that solving the game together would bring about peace?

I did find something I didn't understand about NE, I know the no one can gain by deviating, but I thought if someone deviates they lose, but perhaps thats only in certain aspects of poker? Maybe its not a rule at all.

I thought there was no me to care. And that caring is one of those emotion things which dont really exist.

This is what I would like to go into. I am not sure it was me that said something so outright. I won't say the me doesn't exist so much as our understanding of it is not correct.

I have simply pointed out its clear to see if each of us gave awareness to the problems of others rather than our own daily strife, much (or all) of the needless suffering in this world would dissipate.

This world without suffering is a better place for the 'me'.

But when the 'me' hears of such a solution, it struggles with it.

Some believe it to be a logical struggle, I am suggesting it is a conditioned reaction of an individualistic mind, not rooted in any logic other then 'me' as the center.

This is a legitimate question as well.

Caring seems more like an act than an emotion. It's important to distinguish caring born from self centreness, and caring born from holistic understanding.

The former is not really caring, as its root is hurtful to the whole, but of course that depends on the root of your beliefs, whether it is individualistic or holistic.

You would make a good guru.

I think that Guru isn't real, its what people invent when they don't want to face the facts and truth of the world for themselves.

And I hope we aren't implying anything spiritual here because I think we are talking about the tangible easily observable issues in this world.

Are you sure you know what the word "guru" means? Because this just doesn't make sense.

Well what does it mean to you? To me, in the context of the poster, it suggests a person of a certain substance of wisdom and that they become a teacher or person of authority on the great spiritual matter and questions that the human mind has.

Or you are not interested in discussion but just to search for faults?

Okay. So when you say "I think that Guru isn't real..." what are you saying? (And why did you capitalize it like a proper noun?)

I'm peeking in every now and then to see where the discussion is going. Your last post made zero sense to me, and I'm seeking some form of clarification as to what you meant.

i meant guru in the sense of a wise one who is the authority to such important wisdom. I mean in the sense that many people seek a 'indian' type teacher who will allow them to find inner peace.

We can go into it further to clarify if we need to.

I'm not sure if you know what I am referring to. But I have looked up many of these people, watched many of there lecture.

They exist but they serve no such important or real purpose in the context of finding real meaning in life.

So instead of they don't exist I might say they have no valid authority.

I didn't mean to capitalize it, it just came out of me, I think i meant 'guru'. But it can be ignored that I did that.

I would like to know if you feel you would change the way you approach poker if you new it was proven it would bring peace if everyone in the poker community would follow suit?

Okay. You should be aware that the capitalization in conjunction with the fact that it's singular dramatically changes how one interprets that sentence, especially in the context of what you were responding to.

I'm not sure. I have difficulty getting over the absurdity of the premise.

Ah it sounds like its a type of magic or religion or something. I didn't mean it, my mind just sees the power of the word of people as having false meaning so I meant 'guru' but my mind slipped. That prob still doesn't fully explain it.

The premise is that by working together to solve a game we learn the skills that direct us towards peace. Its really just by cooperating we learn peace, rather than trying to win against each other all day.

The premise is still absurd and I have difficulty taking it seriously enough to give it a serious answer in light of your earlier comments about how you can't learn anything from games.

Cooperation teaches cooperation. Is that really absurd?

Ic. I certainly didn't suggest you can't learn anything from games.

In the context of poker it is. The objective of poker is to prevail over other players, not to make them feel equally warm and fuzzy.

Consider a slightly more extreme example: Let's call the game Chop-a-limb. Rules are simple: Two players, each gets a machete. Whoever chops off a limb of the other player, wins. Clearly, there are strategies involved in this game, there might even be a NE-solution for it, but certainly, cooperating to work out the solution of how to chop off a limb doesn't seem to be the most obvious or practical way to learn cooperation.

In addition, what one would learn through cooperation seems to be how to most effectively chop off limbs from people, not that cooperation is in itself a good (as cooperating to work out the NE-solution of chop-a-liimb leads to chopped-off limbs).

Thx.

Inside the game, cooperation won't do much. But if humans got together irl, to cooperate on dealing with strategies for the chopping arm game, the results would be better for the game and for irl.

This is true of poker too, the game is individually won most when good players have better strategy's and work to keep better strategies from worse players.

But the world would be better if we spent our time practicing cooperation even though our poker game might suffer. Overall the strategy of the game would grow immensely.

The effects of cooperation has its own reward, we are talking about irl cooperation not game theory cooperation. The effects of working together to develop strategy seems unfathomable in itself as well.

The question has been asked, would you give up your edge, if it was found this could bring peace?

How so? If the results lead to a better understanding of how to effectively chop off arms - how is that good for real life?

This is where people disagree with you. Probably no one doubts that it's good to cooperate and that if we all played nice, the world would be a better place. However, we all have experienced that in order to become a better poker player, you have to play for real money. Because only then does losing hurt.

You're claiming that if we all worked together to solve poker, we would "get there" much faster. But why would each individual player want to do that if it means erasing his edge?

You can, of course, say "well, because it benefits mankind" or some such, but then you effectively leave the context of poker completely and it becomes irrelevant which game you chose as the "lesson to be learned" is not about poker anymore.

Yes, but I would maintain that in poker terms this is a crassly -EV move. So, as a poker player, that decision would be disastrous.

This is nonsense. From a game theoretic standpoint, if we cooperated to solve the game of poker, all that would mean is that everyone loses. Poker is a negative-sum game, so there is no solution whereby everyone wins. Yes, the strategy of the game would be more sophisticated, but the purpose of the game is not to have more sophisticated strategy--it is to win money or play better than your opponents.

Of course, this has already been pointed out to you. In fact, if we viewed posting on an internet forum as a game, where the goal is to have stimulating conversation or learning/teaching opportunities, we can illustrate why we should not have a policy of always cooperating. When we encounter trolls or people who are unable to post in an intelligent manner, continuing to respond to them seriously is bad for everyone (except the trolls). Instead, a tit for tat strategy is called for, where we respond seriously to those who are serious, and we ignore or otherwise punish those who are silly.

Would you give up ice cream, if it was found that that this could bring whirled peas?

we get better at solving problems for example.
I don't think top players feel this way, I think many feel many concepts aren't even developed on the tables. Also we could still compete for money

Y This is why i posed the question to you. You lose your edge, but the world has a chance. I am claiming not having this priority straight is the root of the Syrian war for example.

Not its not really ever about poker, however our ability to make optimal decisions in poker, will raise our ability to make optimal decisions irl. But we still have to deal with the fact that optimizing individual ev is optimal in poker, but not necessarily irl.

Yes but we are not all 'poker player' we are humans, irl that are 'poker players' in only a certain sense.

why? poker is a non-cooperative game. you intend to show that real life should be played as a cooperative game. One strategy would have nothing to do with the other - and could even be viewed s counterproductive/misleading.

all the time spent trying to learn a non-cooperative game could be better spent learning a cooperative game which would have more realistic applicability.