Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 294

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't," by Nate Silver.

We have to view technology as what it always has been—a tool for the betterment of the human condition. We should neither worship at the altar of technology nor be frightened by it. Nobody has yet designed, and perhaps no one ever will, a computer that thinks like a human being. But computers are themselves a reflection of human progress and human ingenuity: it is not really “artificial” intelligence if a human designed the artifice.”



Poker is sometimes perceived to be a highly psychological game, a battle of wills in which opponents seek to make perfect reads on one another by staring into one another’s souls, looking for “tells” that reliably betray the con­tents of the other hands. There is a little bit of this in poker, especially at the higher limits, but not nearly as much as you’d think. (The psychological factors in poker come mostly in the form of self-discipline.) Instead, poker is an incred­ibly mathematical game that depends on making probabilistic judgments amid uncertainty, the same skills that are important in any type of prediction.



Play well and win; play well and lose; play badly and lose; play badly and win: every poker player has experienced each of these conditions so many times over that they know there is a difference between process and results.