December 22, 2010
The Final Piece of the Mental Game
I've been in a mental holding pattern for a few weeks now. I've been heavily influenced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for the past few months, and I think I've been unable to reconcile his warnings on the futility of risk taking in complex domains due to the limits of knowledge in such domains with the act of playing poker. I felt like a hypocrite. To reference a favorite analogy of NNT, I was a man riding the elevator up to the gym to use the stairmaster. There was a disconnect between domains.
If stock trading is a fool's game, then what was I doing wasting my time in this simplified version of it? I still played occasionally for entertainment, but my heart was no longer in it. I had lost the conviction that this was worthwhile. I don't just want to be another lucky idiot. If that's my best possible scenario, I can save myself a lot of sweat and play the lottery instead. And I'll ultimately save myself from the illusion of thinking my win was mostly through skill. As Ludwig Borne said, "Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth." If all the poker skill in the world is necessary but not sufficient to become a real winner, I might as well just go to night school in dentistry and lead an intellectually honest life.
Then I heard this! Eureka! Let's aggressively take risks in domains not subject to the Black Swan problem! Poker is a simple domain. It has easy, calculable odds. The variables are finite. It's not subject to the Black Swan or blowing up spectacularly. I can't lose more than I ever expect to lose, the bankroll. I can't leverage myself into blowing up 2, 3, 100 times my bankroll. So simple, yet I was too stupid to realize it myself. I was paralyzed into inaction.
It's time to take risks again. With the knowledge of those risks. Not as a coward or an idiot who takes risks only because he does not know the odds. I go forward, into Aggressive Certainty!
3 Comments:
AshThePro posted on December 22, 2010 at 18:41 PM
You've read the black swan? I'm making my way through it right now. Its kind of dense, not like something I have read in a long time.
BTW, There is never a final piece. Thats counter productive to your mental game. Its similar finding "the one" it doesn't exist and never will in this universe
nawhead posted on December 22, 2010 at 21:51 PM
i've read Fooled By Randomness many times, but only just a few pages of The Black Swan. it starts off a bit less dramatically and much more scholarly (dry) than Fooled i think. Taleb actually says Fooled is "not very deep" compared to Black Swan since he wrote the first in his spare time. but i think that's why i like it. but he says both books are essentially the same, so i can't be missing too much.
as for the final piece, you're right. there never should be an end to mental growth. i'm merely referring to a key component that i think i was missing from pushing me further in my game, namely motivation. i can't be motivated to do something if i think i'm lying to myself or i'm being misled by others (either consciously or out of ignorance).
it was Taleb that put that doubt in my head. and he also put it back. and i think i'm stronger for it!
AshThePro posted on December 23, 2010 at 00:17 AM
Ah I gotcha. Yeah that makes sense.
And yeah, the black swan is pretty dry overall, although it is getting better. Its taking me a long time to get through. Not like a Malcolm Gladwell book. Doesn't flow as well and I really have a hard time understanding it sometimes. I have to re-read paragraphs constantly.
Log in or sign up to leave a comment!