There is a fantastic blog post by Ross Rheingans-Yoo about the shortcomings of poker as a tool to teach trading and why Figgie is a better one. https://blog.rossry.net/figgie/
He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/
Beautiful eulogy. I don't know the author nor the eulogized but reading the eulogy made me appreciate people like those two (poker players, options traders, sports gamblers etc).
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil - when I feel completely the opposite. The two inventors of Figgie may not have contributed directly to curing cancer, saving the dolphins or the whales - dare I posit that most of tech building enterprise JIRA-esque todo-lists, e-commerce middleware and ad trackers don't either.
What I love about their friendship is that I see poker/gambler-mindset of always going for it, shoving the chips to the middle of the table when the pot-odds are good and it is a +EV play. I think they went all-in on several projects such as Figgie, AI Poker and teaching - seemingly all without the whole LinkedIn life coach-advised manner of building up your brand, client-base etc.
The older I get, I find more value too in the honesty of finance and trader types. Yes trading is about money but being honest about that is ironically one of the most altruistic things that can happen for a person. I find that most traders and gamblers who become aware of their greed and selfishness in their work - ironically also causes them to be very generous and selfless people in life due to their constant awareness of that limitation; and to also have zero fox given about what other people think of them professionally and socially (vs. in tech nowadays).
As an options trader/gambler, I'm thankful for the author's eulogy and their efforts in inventing the game. It's a bittersweet story. I read from the eulogy that Max Chiswick embraced the variance of life. Their friendship albeit short and sweet for me is like a fat right tail call option - the holding period might've only been a year and change - but the payoff is one that enriches the soul for life.
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil
Trading is one of the least evil things that goes on on Wall Street. Starting wars for profit (e.g., Blackwater) and buying additional houses as investments (as private equity firms do) and making massive job cuts while posting record profits, are all evil. I loathe capitalism but I agree that quants and traders are some of the least compromised people, whereas “change the world” techies and now techzis are the worst. Traders are, as you said, honest about their motivations.
Ultimately there is no ethical production or consumption in a system as rotten as ours, and everyone has to make a choice. Graveyards are full of moral people, and country clubs are full of humanity’s absolute worst. And if one has children, the argument can be made that failing to provide for them is ethically worse than taking a job within capitalism so long as one isn’t directly harming anyone.
Trading between members of our species is part of what puts humans on top; it's another form of collaboration and some other species do it to a degree, but nowhere near the level that we do.
But the evolution from trading x for y to trading x for y governed by z ie introducing fiat currency is the issue.
Lightning trades and trading in general that produces nothing of value is the issue. It goes deeper, with the wealthy able to lobby and keep tax havens legal but I don't expect anything to change so why say anything more on it.
What if curing cancer needs education, applied intellect, and inspiration more than it needs "financing"?
No small number of examples of places with plenty of financiers that have said "aha, we need to have [thing X], let's [throw some money at it]" without much useful results because they don't actually have the necessary people, knowhow, networks, or institutions.
> What if curing cancer needs education, applied intellect, and inspiration more than it needs "financing"?
unlocking liquidity of currently hard to value assets will remove distractions for a broader set of people to get education, apply their intellect, and be inspired including to cure. many people are not applying their intellect because they are distracted by their illiquidity, basically all of their life.
> plenty of financiers that have said "aha, we need to have [thing X], let's [throw some money at it]" without much useful results
misallocated capital is a symptom of current market inefficiencies and has nothing to do with the concept of people working in finance versus whatever you prefer
To me both are beautiful. At risk of getting further tangential lol, microbiology and cancer genomics to me are beautiful competitions like trading between market participants (cancer cells vs immune cells).
What I'm trying to say is I don't buy the notion of humans "conquering" a disease or the virtue of somehow "elevating" ourselves beyond greed. We are just player-actors in both the beautiful cycle of life-and-death and the madness of crowds participating in markets of life (airbnb rental, dating, job, you name it). To pretend otherwise that somehow we can solve and tame uncertainty is -EV.
Worth noting the author's retraction of the figgie post mentioned, which he makes in the eulogy post:
"Put that way, I was (and am) convinced that my original post was arguing against a strawman . I had never actually played the kind of poker that would make a fair comparison!"
I play poker. It really takes thousands of hours to understand the game from a strategic point of view. Then when you have a few very good players, maybe you can start talking about psychology.
Very sad. Max wrote about optimizing nutrition and cited a satire piece about over-optimization ruining someone's life. Then, ironically, he died from malaria while traveling—despite having donated to malaria prevention. Life defies our attempts to control it.
My impression is that he’s sincere, but that his writing is lighthearted and does “overplay” things for humorous effect. That said, I do think he’s opposed to seed oil. Not having looked into it much, I can’t judge whether he’s crazy or not. But even if he’s wrong, who among us _doesn’t_ have some conspiracy-ish views? I’ll go first: I think fruit juice and milk are not “health foods”, and more comparable to soda. We’ve been duped by Big Milk.
Plenty of agricultural subsidies there for sure, but milk and even fruit juice do provide some nutrients (besides sugar and water) so I think it might be overstating the case a little to lump them in with soda.
I don’t think it requires conspiratorial thinking to believe that seed oils are less healthful than more traditional sources of cooking oils / fats (for one reason or another). Regardless of that, given that seed oils can be produced cheaply and incorporated in to foods to increase profit, “seed oil infiltration” into foods is very real.
Wow, just read through the eulogy and dug up some further links to explore, by Max Chiswick. Some really amazing content developed by these two, but never widely circulated.
The cabal at Jane Street keeps getting dirtier and nastier. For those of us who happen to have known them from their ivy league days at MIT and Harvard on to predictably careers at JS, HRT or Five Rings, no surprises here.
They all 1)ran student clubs, often time starting their own if they had to, but couldn't care less about the mission or welfare of the group, just so it'd be show leadership skills. They all 2) swore allegiance to Effective Altruism mental without ever volunteering a minute to any worthy cause, most interestingly, 3)interbred only among themselves, possibly because they're too smart to associate with other students.
I find it amazing just how just a few firms on Wall Street seem to fish out all sorts of sociopaths right of ivy league grads. SBF(MIT), R-Yoo brothers (Harvard), happen to have made it to the news so far, but there are new generations coming right behind them - just look for Effective Altruism on their LinkedIn profile.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/business/ftx-sbf-modulo-c...
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil - when I feel completely the opposite. The two inventors of Figgie may not have contributed directly to curing cancer, saving the dolphins or the whales - dare I posit that most of tech building enterprise JIRA-esque todo-lists, e-commerce middleware and ad trackers don't either.
What I love about their friendship is that I see poker/gambler-mindset of always going for it, shoving the chips to the middle of the table when the pot-odds are good and it is a +EV play. I think they went all-in on several projects such as Figgie, AI Poker and teaching - seemingly all without the whole LinkedIn life coach-advised manner of building up your brand, client-base etc.
The older I get, I find more value too in the honesty of finance and trader types. Yes trading is about money but being honest about that is ironically one of the most altruistic things that can happen for a person. I find that most traders and gamblers who become aware of their greed and selfishness in their work - ironically also causes them to be very generous and selfless people in life due to their constant awareness of that limitation; and to also have zero fox given about what other people think of them professionally and socially (vs. in tech nowadays).
As an options trader/gambler, I'm thankful for the author's eulogy and their efforts in inventing the game. It's a bittersweet story. I read from the eulogy that Max Chiswick embraced the variance of life. Their friendship albeit short and sweet for me is like a fat right tail call option - the holding period might've only been a year and change - but the payoff is one that enriches the soul for life.