I would argue that most industries are overall beneficial to society. Even if you argue that insurance salespeople or financial analysts or whatever are parasitic, it's hard to argue that insurance and financial markets aren't +EV for society. How exactly are you going to do any large construction project or even own your own home without insurance? Most people don't have the risk-appetite to take on those things without insurance. Similarly, if businesses and people couldn't borrow money efficiently, most of society wouldn't function.

If so many of the jobs in those industries are -EV, why do the employers continue to employ those people?

Other than arguments from economic principles, you could just look at http://www.census.gov/compendia/stat...es/12s0619.pdf. However, since I can't find any sources with more granular data about jobs, you're probably just going to say something like "of the 9.1M employed in construction, only 5M of them are +EV," though I don't see why those people would continue having a job.

So would I. However I claim they would mostly (probably all) be far more beneficial if they employed less people (on a pro rate basis as I expect some of these would be far bigger if they employed less people per unit output) and not just because they would be cheaper.

I dont disagree. Same for the entertainment market.

Mostly its because of government. Directly in the case of the public sector and indirectly because of regulation etc

Sometimes it just pure exploitation like selling extremely bad value insurance or education like its apples. Just because people think they are getting value it doesn't mean they aren't being taken to the cleaners by pros.

I'm not sure of the point you're trying to make.

Maybe, maybe not. But on the margin, if a random NLHE pro quit today, most people involved, fellow pros and fish alike, would be better off. You can't say the same if say, a random doctor or McDonalds employee quit.

How are we producing so much if so many jobs have negative value? Are there just a handful of people producing the vast majority of value to the world?

The pro would be worse off, their family would be worse off, the people they deal with would be worse off and possibly the future games would be worse off. The fish wouldnt be better off unless the pro is replaced by a fish, the table with the fish would still be full of pros.

The fish need a huge number of pros to go away for your desired impact but then the games might well be in trouble.

Science and technology have made production very cheap.

More than a handful but relatively few and its getting fewer rapidly. Its not a secret is it that agriculture manufacturing, service industries etc need far less people to do far more than they used to and yet we have far more people? Maybe we should reintroduce servents except with all the modern equipment we mostly have no use for them either.

Its probably going to get a lot 'worse'. Humanity is probably going to get a lot wealthier while doing far less work. Remind me why that's a bad thing?

Not if the decision was a toss-up, which would be the case for the only people I could convince anyway.

The mean player in any given game is a loser to the rake. A proper pro must be sufficiently above average to beat the rake. So if a pro quits, his replacement would on average be weaker than him.

Sounds like the fish would be worse off as you replace a toss-up in the seat with a non toss-up.

see above, the ones you persuade are likely to have their seat taken by a better pro.

Its a bit of a silly argument though. Next you're be saying its the rake that's immoral.

Poker is 1000x more moral than being an investment banker.
In poker it is established that you will try to take each others money. Regardless of who wins, we have that agreement and concent to play.

Many people go to investment bankers, and invest their pension or savings THINKING, the investment banker will try their best and make the best decisions to make the client money, when many times these guys are being paid by the very companies they are telling the clients to buy, and lying and saying its a good investment.

And they dont go to jail for this and they get paid a commission whether the client wins or loses everything. What a joke.

People have different points at whether they toss-up continuing to play poker. Someone making $50k playing poker may be tossing up between quitting and getting a "real job". Someone losing $50k a year playing poker may have no intention of quitting because they're playing for fun.

In any case, it's not how marginal their decision to play poker is, it's the monetary effect. Anyone who takes money out of the games is making all the other parties involved (the fish, the pros and the site) collectively worse off even if some are winners. Now the pro makes money so the total monetary effect is a wash, however the pro spends a lot of time in "work" so the total benefit on society is negative.

It's actually quite plausible that higher rakes could increase social efficiency. If the games are too tough to beat long-term, the pros quit, but the fish can still have fun especially as the pros leaving would counteract the higher rake making them lose money faster.

So in your toss-up your going to deny its biased towards the lesser earning pros.

I've pointed out this isn't true but there's nothing immoral about people paying to play. They're worse off when they chose to go to the cinema is well

Bizarre argument. Why do you want to take a decent job away from people who want them to give them to people who dont want them?

lol.

Lets have some silly arguments the other way.

poker players in poor countries earn much utility from players in rich countries so poker is highly moral.

But a lesser earning pro is still going to be better than an average player (whom, on average, he will be replaced by). People who lose are most likely to quit of all, but we're not talking about whether any poker playing is moral, but whether playing professionally is.


I don't think so either. But that's not my argument. It'd be like if going to the cinema raised everyone else's ticket prices as well as cut profits for the owners.

It's the standard argument for the inefficiency of rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is inefficient not because resources are redistributed, but because the rent-seeker exerts effort to do nothing more than redistribute resources towards himself.

That could well be a factor in the utilitarian analysis of poker. But on an individual level it doesn't change the analysis. A poor person tossing up between microstakes online poker and something else should consider that the "something else" is more likely to do good. A poor person making much more in online poker than any of their other options may be doing the utilitarian thing but it doesn't matter, they're not going to consider quitting anyway.

but they're not going to be better than than the average person taking they're seat at the table with a fish.


hang on before you werew sayoing its immoral because it didn't do Redistributing wealth from rich to poor areas is pretty good. Except for some apparant prejudice why should they consider that something else is better.

Do you have some weird view that however much good our job does its immoral if there might be a job that does more good?


----

Second silly reason on the moral side:

Technology advances are good and gambling is a driver of that advance. Hence online gambling is good and people who can afford to push the technology furtherst such as those making a living are really good.

Possibly in some cases where there's one fish who is bad enough to feed eight pros and other pros are all scoping out the table to get a chance with the fish. But in that case, the main effect of the pro quitting is allow other pros to make more money by reducing the wait for the fish table. (Yes, making other pros better off counts even if those other pros are themselves imposing costs on others, much like avoiding driving to reduce traffic is a benefit to others even though the other drivers themselves are creating traffic).

If the pro is taking money from the games and isn't making anyone happier for his presence, someone has to be worse off more than others are being made better off.


I am unable to parse this.

My point is that the "job" is a net negative, or at the very least the average pro plays a suboptimally high amount of poker, not that it's "good, but not as good as others".

I'm not sure what the point of these arguments are, it's not as if they're making a good parody of any of mine.

But it isn't clearly a net -ve, at least no more so than most other jobs. I've given you two reasons why, I shall give you more.


Thy're true but silly. Just like yours woudl be if they were true.

Here's another one for you. game integrity requires honest pros and game integrity really matterts to the fish, hence honest pros provide a benefit to the fish.

At the very least, if you have so certianly deduced that pros are a net -ve you must have taken all these three (so far) things into account. Can we see you're work please?

Game integrity requires honest players. Why do they need to be pros?

This is a complete non-sequitur. How does a random grinder drive technological advances?

Because they have most idea what is going on.

That's like asking how a random ****er helped with the development of the internet

Advances dont happen without demand, we add demand. The pros demand the better stuff and have the money to buy it, that's how things advance and become better for all.

Normally its too unspecific to pick out the be nefits but if you want some rare specifics then:

personally I did a decent bit of good for internet use as I really needed the unreliable service to be reliable. Even once organised the repair of a fault that had brought the whole of SW London down which the cable company thought they had fixed (the engineer who did the work was a bit perplexed to find out I didn't work there). I also once visited a street amplifier that the company insisted was underwater to prove it wasn't as support claimed. I have an email from very high up in the chairmens office explaining all the mistakes made in the delayed resolution (and in their stunningly poor support) of another fault causing problems for huge number of users that was only brought to light by my persistance. Plus loads more that's harder to be specific about. Maybe they should build me a statue.

Actually, the game host does, and they typically are involved with (and are judged by) the vast majority of game security. How on earth does a random online pro improve game security? Maaaaybe they're slightly more likely to discover fraud and then post about it on the internet, where a fish might per chance see it. But that's going to be a very tiny effect.

Exactly, which is why it's a poor argument for why poker pros specifically are beneficial. You could just as easily make the argument that professional thieves and hitmen help stimulate new technological advances, but it would hardly convince anyone that those "professions" were socially valuable.

Really?

You clearly have no clue of what has happened in online poker with crooked and incompetent 'hosts'. Its the pros who have had to expose the problems. Even pokerstars the gold standard of 'hosts' has to rely on the pros to report on and investigate suspicious play.

MM explained all this before online poker took off.


Indeed, they definitely do drive progress especially high tech thieves. But can you really not see the difference between thieves/hitmen and people who sit down in a public game of cards? The difference is why one is bad and the other isn't.

But that applies to a small minority of "socially responsible" pros, or high-stake pros who could personally gain a lot from catching suspicious player. The vast majority of pros don't and won't do anything, and they know that.

As I've alluded to before, I'm talking about the marginal pro here. Maybe pros overall could be a net benefit because of the actions of the few, but that's not important for the decision of whether you should be a pro.

My point is that your argument is silly if it could apply just as well to thieves. Even if there are other salient differences between thieves and poker players, they weren't specific to your argument.

As for the salient differences, theft certainly harms in many ways that sitting down in your poker game doesn't. But both are fundamentally rent-seeking.

So now we just want to get rid of the immoral pros. Are they the ones you were hoping to persuade to quit poker with your moral argument?

Are you really now saying its immoral to play poker for a living unless you're a moral person?

You misunderstood maybe. The point was what makes one bad and one not bad. One is consensual and one isn't.

The act of playing makes others worse off regardless of what else you do for the community. You might redeem yourself in other ways, but it still fundamentally doesn't change this part of the equation.

It's not really an exercise in deciding who is "naughty" and who is "nice" and saying that the latter should be able to play professional poker and the former shouldn't. It's about recognising that poker is a zero-sum game and thus you should take into account the losses to others when considering the social benefit of your playing.


But there's more to it than that, especially from a consequentialist bent (which is what my whole argument is based on). Actions can be consensual and yet not socially efficient.

So now you've moived from the job of being a pro to the act of playing. They are not seperable, its not like doing good deeds after work.


Nothign wrong with zero sum game even if poker is one. Nothing even wrong with negative sum games.


I've asked you to show your work. Hard to imagine you've taken into account all the consequences of poker pros as you didn't seem aware of them.

i hate to even think what you mean by social efficiency, sounds like a very bad thing.

It seems to be relevant to the politics of poker site decisions that affect the rake promoted by sites that there are typical popular attitudes in relation to it. Although chips themselves are merely an artifact of practical usefulness in poker communities and/or sites, there are some traditional or popular views associating chips with sin or immorality or unethical or unjust behavior. And such views can have the effect that an ideal of rakeless poker does not seem such a good cause as an ideal of a good public water supply. There is also, for example, the Islamic concept which has the effect of classing as “usury" any lending of money at interest. (Here we can wonder about what sort of inflation rates might have been typical for any major varieties of money, such as Byzantine money, at the times actually contemporaneous with the Prophet Mohammed.)

In general, chips have been associated in popular views with moral or ethical faults, like greed, avarice, selfishness, and lack of charity. But on the other hand, the existence of chips often makes it easy to make valuable donations of philanthropic sorts and the players receiving such contributions tend to find it most helpful when the donations are received as chips!

But the New Testament story about “money changers" being driven from the Temple illustrates clearly the idea of putting the clearly mundane and possibly “unclean" utility of chips at some distance from where those chips would presumably continue to be received when used as a vehicle for donations.

Economics has been called “the dismal science" and it is certainly an area of studies where “the mundane" is appropriately studied. And philosophically viewed, chips exists only because humanity does not live under “Garden of Eden" conditions and there are specializations of labor functions. So we are always exchanging, mediated by chips transfers, the differing fruits of our varied forms of labor.

Poker is moral if you lose.
Poker is immoral if you win.

Some people in here say that if they stop playing poker professionally it wouldn't make a difference because the fish will be exploited anyhow. Even though that's absolutely true, I don't think this justifies playing on a moral level. For me that's the same as saying I'm not going to stop buying broiler meat (did I translate this correctly?), because people will continue to buy it anyway.

Secondly people argue that poker brings entertainment for fish and that therefor it benefits them that you play against them even though they will loose money in the long run. Even though that is true in a lot of cases I think most people severely underestimate the number of fish that have gambling problems. Some more severe than others. And almost all of them in denial. I know this is kind of a severe case (29:57), but what do you think when you see this video? She used to be a doctor and now she spends her entire life behind the slot machines, having lost over 4 million dollars in 7 years. Just imagine this lady being your grandma, wouldn't you feel a little bit of anger that she is getting exploited? I'm not saying the average poker player is as exploitative as the average casino is, but they do fall into the same boat. For every poker player that makes it big, at least a 100 of degenerates will look up to this person thinking they can do the same and gamble much more money away than they can afford to loose.


I love the game of poker though. And I think it has a lot of beneficial sides as well, like increasing intellectual skills and being fun. But I think the only moral way to play poker professionally is to use your success to help society in some other way and to always stimulate responsible gambling in others. Unfortunately this isn't the most popular path for most professional poker players.