Ludic Fallacy
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Taleb is sort of a counter to Black-Sholes option pricing. Black-Sholes assumes a Gaussian distribution. Given that assumption, a few numbers let you quantify risk. That's convenient, but somewhat unrealistic, and was taken way too seriously by the bond market from the 1980s to 2008. It provided a philosophical underpinning for the junk bond market. (They can't possibly all go bad at the same time, can they?)
In kind environments (most games) "patterns recur, situations are constrained, and importantly, every time you do something you get feedback that is totally obvious, all the information is available, the feedback is quick, and it is 100% accurate"
In contrast, wicked environments (most of the rest of life!!!) none of the properties of kind environments hold, and in some extreme cases the feedback teaches you the exact wrong lesson.
In the book, he similarly warns against taking the lessons from successful people in chess or golf and applying them to our own wicked lives.
I enjoyed it but felt like it was a bunch of other peoples ideas (Taleb, Kahneman, Levitin, etc) strung together.
The fallacy is that winning a world championship at kickboxing must mean that you're an excellent kickboxer, but nope.
The fact that he was able to hold off experienced fighters, even if they were below his weight class, means he was plenty qualified to be there despite his very modest self assessment.
[Edited from here] He seems to be an actual fighter under Dave Camarillo but the framing of this story, that he's just an average "stuff my face with peanut butter sandwiches, tricked the weigh-in" kind of guy, is just in order to sell his "life hacks" books.
All I can find is that 1999 was the second year for the championship which could mean not very strong competition. But there's no mention of him in any Wushu/Sanda/Sanshou championship. He also used to claim that he is a "Cage fighter in Japan, vanquisher of four world champions (MMA)" (since removed from his page). Being a 4 time world champion would have contradicted his "just a regular guy using life hacks" premise. Without an actual record of him winning that "Chinese Kickboxing National Championships 1999" I guess he's just peddling the same "tricks" from his book. One of them might be "just say you did it".
You opponent will not wait for you to bend the rules a few times before they react unless the first bend knocks them out. Pushing people off the fighting surface might work once, maybe twice. If that's the only weapon in a fighter's arsenal I see a fractured skull in their immediate future. :)
No, the more I look at this the more I realize the story of the regular guy exploiting loopholes to win a championship is a good "how the little guy won" story but also a complete fabrication. It's only good for the circle-jerk media, he gets to sell himself as special, they get to fill their pages with something.
All of his claims in general seem to always reference some "evidence" that's never available in any form. A con-man using his cons to sell his cons. His old [1] and new [1] bios are pretty telling, his achievements tend to come and go.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070308133948/http://fourhourwo...
> Wired Magazine’s “Greatest Self-Promoter of 2008”
Certainly
It being some kind of unblockable kick is BS of course.
There appears to be some footage of it in this video.
From what I gather from a short internet search he changed his story repeatedly depending on what sold more. He's either an experienced fighter with multiple world championship wins, or an average guy using his own tricks to win. But his name is not associated with any official leaderboard or championship win as far as I can tell.
As someone who has consistently excelled at amateur martial arts I can guarantee there's no way a world champion gets beaten by some guy pushing him off the lei tai repeatedly even after the same technique was used in every round and with all other opponents. I could knock out almost any "non-trained" person with a single well placed punch or kick, and if they weren't well placed they would still do some temporarily debilitating damage. Yet whenever I had friendly fights with well trained pros, including ones with good results in international championships but no gold medals, I have no words to describe how inadequate and unprepared I felt.
All I'm saying is that the story is not what it seems. Whether he is an actual pro worthy of a gold medal, or some incredible fluke made him fight severely unprepared opponents I don't know. But he certainly didn't win anything because he tricked the weigh-in (that's standard procedure), or because he pushed opponents off the lei tai round after round, opponent after opponent and none of those world class fighters had any recourse.
This is how a fight would look like [0]. You win that by going to a lower weight class and "pushing" only if you are perfectly able to take the hits anyway and are already good. Tricks will get you from silver to gold, not from peanut butter.
> I’m not saying you couldn’t win a kickboxing tournament like that. I just think it’d be nice if he at least gave the year and location of the tournament so interested parties could look into it.
Bears in woods and catholic popes come to mind.
Every poll of a race comes with two numbers, one a fraction of support for whatever issue or candidate is being measured, and the other a "margin of error" (which in the industry is a 95% confidence interval, I believe). This is just a statistical measure based on sample size. It's backed by two centuries of math and no one interestingly disputes the way the number is calculated or whate it means.
And there are a LOT of these polls taken. So take all those polls, check their variance, and you'll find that it's much higher than the value you'd expect given the margins of error they reported. This is a routine effect. So square that: why are the MoE numbers "wrong", given that multiple measurements of the same number are giving values with more noise than expected?
The answer is exactly this paradox. The model, that all these polls are measuring the same thing, is wrong. They aren't measuring the same thing. The different polls use different sampling methods, they weight their data using different algorithms, with opinion polls they phrase the questions slightly differently (or just ask the same questions in a different order), all of which affect the results.
And this happens everywhere in science. It's a frightenly easy mistake to make, especially as data sets get large.
In the "suspicious coin" example, there is an opening assumption that the coin is fair, but it transpires clear evidence to the contrary.
It isn't a fallacy to continue to treat this as a game: it has just become sensible to drop the assumption and treat it as a game where you are unsure about whether the coin is fair (as the second player in the example, in fact, does).
I understood it differently: there are no assumptions per se, just a request to make an assumption. The request is made by a third party and all this is part of the thought experiment.
> It isn't a fallacy to continue to treat this as a game
True. The article states that “The ludic fallacy here is to assume that in real life the rules from the purely hypothetical model (where Dr. John is correct) apply.”.
> treat it as a game where you are unsure about whether the coin is fair
This significantly modifies the scope of the original game.
I understood this as an example of how simplified models might easily stop being useful because of real life conditions.
Until they don't.
This happened in March, and I just love the Reddit headline:
Someone yolo’d a pension fund
https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/g5r5n6/some...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2020/03/25/billiona...
The tragedy of it of course is that the incompetent pension managers will keep their last ten years of performance bonuses, and the citizens of Alberta will get ... tax increases.
Two literal takes on that are:
- "Super Seducer: How to Talk to Grils" a (somewhat controversial) game on Steam by Richard La Ruina, a Pick-Up Artist - https://store.steampowered.com/app/695920/Super_Seducer__How...
- "If Dating was like Who Wants to be a Millionaire" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E33j3gQg98
While some analogies of a game are in place (depending on someone's action, it's "fail" or "progress"), I think that the worst fallacy is that one always can, and should, "win". Depending on the attitude, it is anything from frustrating (obsessing why one has failed despite the effort, or ending in a relationship with a wrong person) to outright dangerous.
Another criticism by Nassim Taleb to this field is the use of the normal distribution to distributions that are not normal at all. This could lead to the problem that I described in the previous paragraph.
Good examples are carry trades and insurance market punts - people know that the central bank of Japan has to do X, they know that people are getting old in the developed world... betting on this happening is mostly a clever thing to do.
Every so often at random along comes an event that throws all this into the air - this might be something massive or something small but when it happens people go bust. For example, well look around.
There is a lot of talk that "oh we will know when we are in trouble and we will just change strategy" but sometimes that just proves not to be so. The point is that getting to play the game well for long enough to prosper is just luck, getting out at the right time is just luck. You can be stupid and get taken to the cleaners at any time, and you can play well and just be "the fat rabbit" at any time as well. So, be lucky and play well.
> A third party asks them to "assume that a coin is fair, i.e., has an equal probability of coming up heads or tails when flipped. I flip it ninety-nine times and get heads each time. What are the odds of my getting tails on my next throw?"
Istm that Fat Tony here gets the right answer to the wrong question. Whether we should assume this is not part of the question. That this is a useful thing to ask IRL doesn't change the fact that if you posed this to me IRL and smugly quoted the ludic fallacy at me for correctly answering your question I'd be strongly tempted to deck you.
https://xkcd.com/169/ comes to mind.
As Randall says, "communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."
If you’ve just lost two billion dollars, or killed 200,000 people in a preventable war, no one cares that the assumptions were reasonable.
"Assume you jump off a bridge. Would you be dead?"
"No, because I'd change my mind. What, you think I'd jump off a bridge because someone tells me to?"
"No, but I'd rather expect you'd assume it because I tell you, in the context of a hypothetical."
If this was about a purely intellectual roleplaying game with internal rules there would be no discussion in the first place.
Which is what makes the discussion bullshit. Because if you're starting your experiment with "assume that", that's what you're signalling you're doing.
As for more reasons why this is bullshit, see the gambler's fallacy and the Monty Hall problem – intuition is often terrible at arriving at the right prediction.
The fact that your model can be justified as technically correct is irrelevant. When the data doesn't fit the model any more, the supposed absolute correctness of the textbook model blocks your ability to understand what's happening.
This isn't even about games, but about whether it's possible to be open-minded enough to consider that simple textbook "solutions" are not guaranteed to be a good fit for real problems - especially if you don't understand their limitations or the assumptions they're based on.
And it doesn't just apply to statistics.
A) a hypothetical introduced by the idiom "Assume that..." (which introduces a statement of fact in the hypothetical situation), and we are discussing a scenario in which the coin is in fact fair, in which case Dr. John is correct and Fat Tony is committing the gambler's fallacy, or
B) a scenario in which a third-party tells someone that the coin is fair, but that is simply an assumption that should be updated by new evidence, in which case Dr. John would be committing the ludic fallacy.
The example isn't instructive because anyone reading this and thinking of scenario A isn't disputing the idea that, if this happened in reality, you should throw away the model. They're just interpreting the phrase "assume that" differently.
In the example, you agreed to assume the coin is fair. That is, you agreed to stick to the model even if it turns out to be wrong. Throwing the model away, however suggested by the evidence, is just violating the rules you agreed to.
Or maybe to be nicer about it the proper response is "So are we talking about the real world because in the real world the odds of 99 heads in a row are 1 in 2^100 which is effectively zero so I just want to verify you understand that your hypothetical situation and conclusion will have no basis in reality. If you actually saw 99 heads in a row then the odds are infinitely higher the coin is broken and is not fair"
This has no meaning.
But it's vague and meaningless enough you can pull it out when you want to prove something involving statistics or models not working, which they mostly don't.