Related to: Problem of verifying rationality
We're excited to announce the (soft) launch of RationalPoker.com! It's a new guide developed by me, Zvi, Kevin, and patrissimo detailing how to use online poker as rationality training to conquer your cognitive biases. We want our community to go from knowing a lot about cognitive biases to actually having a training method that allows us to integrate that knowledge into our habits -- truly reducing biases instead of just leaving us perpetually lamenting our flawed brain-ware. In the coming weeks, we'll be making the case that online poker is a useful rationalist pursuit along with developing introductory "How To" material that allows those who join us to play profitably.
We want to make sure we aren’t wasting our time practicing an ungrounded art with methods that don’t work. Poker gives us an objective way to test x-rationality. The difference between winning and losing in poker once you know a small amount of domain-specific knowledge is due to differing levels of rationality. Our site will be presenting the case that a strong rationalist who can act on their knowledge of cognitive biases (a defining feature of x-rationality but not traditional rationality) should have a distinct advantage. We'll be offering the connecting material between the sequences and online poker to teach you how to apply knowledge of cognitive biases to poker in a way that verifies your current level of rationality and naturally teaches you to improve your rationality over time.
Incidentally, this also presents a solution for those of us looking to earn money from anywhere with a flexible schedule that leaves time for outside interests.
We’re just getting started so please be kind! Our site is definitely not a final product yet. If you're curious about where we're going with this though, add us to your RSS feeds or check the site every few days. We hope some of you who aren't convinced yet consider playing once you feel like we’ve finally given you enough information to understand why poker is a profitable rationalist pursuit.
Also, if you sign up for one of the online poker rooms like Full Tilt using our affiliate links, the residuals get donated to Less Wrong/Singularity Institute. That way, the more poker you play after you sign up, the more money you direct towards raising the sanity waterline and creating provably friendly artificial intelligence.
We’re not counting on it, but even a very small group of us could theoretically fund SIAI in a very real and meaningful way just as a side-effect of playing a lot of online poker. I know I'm partisan, but this seems like an unreasonably exciting opportunity! So if you support SIAI and you (or your friends) want to sign up to play online poker anyway, please sign-up using our links.
Anyway, we hope some of you want to get stronger by joining us in the Rationality Dojo of online poker. You can be part of our crew of aspiring rationalists who want to increase our rationality, earn money, and help save the world -- all by playing a fun computer game with no boss, no schedule, and the potential for lots of self-development and personal growth.
So check out our site and let us know if you're interested in joining.
Our hypothesis isn't that simple rationalism will lead to big wins. It's that rationalists have an above average chance of becoming a winning player compared to the average fraternity brother that makes it through Calculus II with a B, which I think is about the level of math competency needed to really succeed at poker. It's also that we can help professional poker players be slightly better players by getting them to read the LW sequences. We want to create new players from rationalists, and turn existing poker players into rationalists.
We are hoping that getting rationalists to try poker will make them more aware of their own emotional irrationality if they turn out to be losing players, and if they turn out to be winning players, so much the better. If we somehow convinced 50% of LW users to devote 10 hours a week to playing poker (yes median LW reader, I know this is unrealistic), I would be surprised if a year later we didn't have at least one person making in the mid six figures via semi-full time poker playing.
There's way more to being good at poker than reading the sequences, but it certainly makes for a good base level of understanding.
I don't think you need any calculus at all to be good at poker. People who are good at poker tend to know calculus, but that's because the US has made the highly dubious decision to prioritize calculus over statistics for smart high school students.
It's not going to be emotional irrationality that's going to derail your target audience. I played poker in my college years - not enough to get great, but enough to get competent. Playing low-level poker is different than higher-level poker. Experience, intelligence, and presence are all helpful.
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