"It is reasonable to judge a child on what he might become. It is far less reasonable for an adult to be wish to be judged on what he could have become rather than on what he is. An intelligent adult who listens to, appreciates, understands, and comments on the work of experts in fields he did not choose himself is infinitely more interesting than one who goes about reminding everyone he could have done better whatever it is they are doing. On the basis on what, exactly? Making the Math Olympiad forty years ago? A Westinghouse project?

That a sixty (?) year old who lived a successful life is worried about these things is sad. I'm 26 and got over it eight years ago."

A lot of you guys are very confused about my motives and where I am coming from when I say I could outmanage most baseball players, or that my 14 year old math ability probably translates into the ability to have become a Harvard professor.

In the baseball case I am speaking for any good gambler/mathmetician who also knows the game. I'm not just talking about myself. Meanwhile if a Mickey Appleman or me ever did achieve success, the present day managers would almost certainly crack open the books to reachieve superiority. So practically it means little.

As for my contention that I am potentially better in math and science than 95% of Phds, I only bring that up to justify the claim that my opinions should be given a lot of weight for reasons other than my poker books. That's not a big deal since, as luckyme would say, my words would speak for themselves. But my lack of credentials does sometimes make me feel like bringing up some other credential like stuff.

One thing I want to make very clear is that I don't talk about the possibility that I could have been one of the top 50 scientists or mathmeticians with regret. Even I strongly doubt that I could have been in the top five. You think I regret not being number 16? Find him and compare his Google hits or half his age girl hits to mine and tell me how they compare.

Do you really believe this?

Change am to was and the answer is an easy yes.

David,

Perhaps you overestimated your potential. I mean, after all, you are where you are and as far as any of us can tell that's about all the potential you've ever had. Don't feel bad, being the second best poker authority isn't so bad. You should be proud of such an accomplishment, given your youthful potential.

leaponthis

No, you are being just as arrogant.

" You think I regret not being number 16? Find him and compare his Google hits or half his age girl hits to mine and tell me how they compare. "

Thats a truly frightening statement.

1, 2 and 3 are good examples of baseball stupidity. I don't think 4 and 5 are. off the top of my head i'd say that managers, on average, IBB approximately as much as they should.

if you think hitting slumps don't exist - that is - that they are just random clusters of "failures" like running cold in LHE, you're wrong and i would guess that you never played baseball.

my effective batting average (or OBP or RC/27 or whatever indicator of ability you want to use) is not constant. it changes all the time due to things like injuries, confidence, the weather, fatigue, the last time i got laid, what my brother said to me on the phone last night, my last meal etc...in addition to the obvious things like park, pitching, fielding, platoon advantage etc that you would account for anyway.

if you know you're swinging the bat worse than your teammmates at the moment, why should you maintain your spot in the order?

here's some more baseball stupidity:
6. not using your best relief pitcher when the game is tied in the 8th or bottom of the 9th
7. not adjusting your batting order when a player is out with an injury or just resting, (batting his replacement in his spot regardless) because "everyone is used to their spot"
8. signing 32 yr old veterans to huge multi-year deals, especially, because they "earned it"
9. overvaluing stats like RBI, HR milestones (ability to hit 30 rather than 26) and batting average.
10. undervaluing the negative impact of making an out.

Being a Twins fan, this stuff is constant. Ron Gardenhire and Terry Ryan are two of the worst logical thinkers I can think of. Yet they both have skills that make them good at their jobs overall. Namely, Ryan is phenomenal at finding, obtaining and developing young talent, and Gardenhire is great at getting his players to play well together. I'm pretty sure that a perfect logician who was even average at the things they excell at could not be better than either at their respective jobs.

That's kind of the thing that I find lame about this whole thread. Someone asked him a, "what if" question, and he answered with frank honesty- and its been convoluted into this whole thing that he's obsessing about the brilliance of his youth, thinks he's better...whatever. Its a what if question, spoiling the fun with "what is" answers should be strictly forbidden.

And I dont agree what you said about adolescent intelligence either. In his post he said, "in the field of economics", i.e. game theory- and if you really believe that David Skalansky somehow missed the boat in game theory in favor of being a joke at cocktail parties...well Ill just have to politely disagree with you there.

I have contradictory impressions relevant to this sort of claim. on the one hand, I hear about people I went to college with that got great PhDs and became professors, and I think, eg, "Him?! Didn't he study 8 hours a day to plod on without ever obviously getting it when talking in class??" But then I also spent a lot of time with math PhD students in a top program who just exuded brilliance. And they burned themselves out spending years to do one little thing that ultimately turns out to be almost a triviality to a top math professor. (My roommate worked under a very recent Field's medalist (who averages less than 1 student per year under him). When he submitted his thesis for publication and got the anonymous reviewer's comments back, it just about broke his heart--and probably caused him to go into finance (something easy). And "his" inequality gets cited in recent theses at other schools. Math may be a special case.)

The deterministic view; if you have not achieved something then it is not possible for you to have achieved it. Probability = 0%.

Obviously for this question to meaningful there you have to allow for the universe to be altered in some way.

I think a much better question is to ask what would have to have been changed for you to have achieved the following;

I wasnt asking about the 95% part, but your justification for brining it up. Do you really believe you merely mention it to add credence to your books, rather than for reasons of ego?

Not credence for my books. Credence for forums like this. In other words if I talk about sins of ommission and commission, and some philosphy professor from Gonzaga poohs poohs it with the comment that I'm just a poker player, I would like to come back at him with the comment that I am a poker player who is probably more intelligent than he is. By his standards of intelligence.

Do you truly believe that an intelligent philosophy professor would stoop so low as to say "pooh poohs"? Well, even if he would I'll wager that he would spell "poo" correctly. You know as in "poopoo". Gonzaga? Is that a real country - cmon!

leaponthis

pooh pooh

Gonzaga University

try again.

You are as silly as Sklansky or maybe sarcasm escapes one of us.

leapnthis

You mean a janitor?

Do you ever read books on politics, social science, or history?

You must understand that to be in top 100 at age 14 in any field requires parental interest ,time involvement, and or financial backing. The top 100 14 year olds at tennis have not defeated all the other 14 year olds, indeed many 14 year olds have never even played the game. To excel is going to require that the child's parents are willing to pay dearly for lessons and are willing to stress the importance of athletics at home.

Your father is quoted as saying "I was constantly working with him (David) at math". Is this a typical upbringing? You're starting out as a very bright youngster but in the absence of someone willing to teach you calculus at a young age it is very unlikely that you would have scored in the top 100. Also, just the fact of your being an only child gives you more time to learn from your parents than someone who has four siblings.

When I took the GRE I scored at the 97th percentile on the analytical section. I definitely had an advantage over others in that I had been introduced to logic puzzles at age 12. It made the test much easier for me than for someone who simply just showed up and took it without ever having been exposed to them. While I am strong at analysis I know several people who were rather bright who didn't have a clue on how to begin to solve logic puzzles and hence were at a large disadvantage to me.

no [censored]. this is a little like a marilyn manson concert. shock value only. keeps the bills paid.

No [censored]! I might go return the poker books I just bought.

i think i saw some poo in here earlier--did somebody shart?

It would be a waste of time if you managed. Baseball traditionalists vastly overate the skill of the 'big shot manager' (Michael Lewis' term). The real power lays with the GM who makes the roster decisions the manager must live with. If you read Bill James (the David Sklansky of baseball theory) and applied your proven problem solving skills (rejecting hidebound and mathematically unsound baseball tradition in the process) you might make a good GM.

I just looked at this thread for the first time, and find it rather absurd, David, that you can think so highly of your potential accomplishments in other fields.

It's pretty indisputable that you're the leading poker theorist in the world, and you've made substantial insights into the theory of gambling. But how many people have devoted their life to this? And what sort of people are they? You simply don't have the top mathematical and analytical minds in the world going into this field. So it's a little like being the top lacrosse player in the US: certainly a worthy accomplishment, but it hardly means you would have made the NFL or MLB if you had chosen a different sport.

You claim that you were in the top 100 14 year olds in math, science, logic, etc. There are two problems with the conclusions you draw from this:

First of all, I seriously doubt it is really true. You were surely in the top 100 14 year olds in realized and demonstrated ability in these fields. But there were likely hundreds to thousands of other 14 year olds who actually had more talent for this, but simply hadn't realized it yet (and would eventually do so in college and graduate school and so on). There is only a relatively weak correlation between those who are among the best 14 year olds at math and those who are the best 40 year olds at math. You can see this by looking at the math (or physics, or philosophy, or whatever) professors at the top departments in the world. What fraction of the top 100 mathematicians in the world at the age of 40 were recognized as in the top 100 at their age (say by math olympiad participation or any other similar metric) when they were in high school? From my brief look at it, I would say the number is around 1/3. It's much lower in other fields (physics maybe 1/10, philosophy probably 1/100). So this gives you a sense that "top 100" really means more like "top 300" in math, and maybe "top 10,000" or so in some other fields.

Second, "top 100" at a given age is not really that great. Think about it: one nobel prize in physics is awarded each year, usually divided 2-3 ways. So you have to be among the 2-3 best in the world (not just the US) at a given age to have a reasonable chance of getting one. And even if you set your sights much lower: there are maybe 1000 professors of physics, total, at "top" US universities. A smaller number of professors of math, etc. These span a range of about 40 years of age. So you're talking about roughly the top 25 physicists at a given age in the US (really quite a bit less, because of the influx of foreign academics to the US) who can aspire to get a job at such a place.

So while I think it is certainly within the realm of possibility that you would have done well in one of these other fields, it's far from the sure thing that you seem to believe.

David, what's your IQ?

Actually, I have a better question: what would you rate your chances of becoming a top-100 chess grandmaster had you started playing actively from your youth?