Yeah. There's also hitrate. If the first try fails, that doesn't mean the idea is entirely hopeless: maybe trying the exact same thing again will work! To learn that the hitrate is low, you need multiple tries. This is really counterintuitive to learn, at least for me.
I think this is absolutely true in today's world, and it's the reason why entrepreneurship works. People and companies who try to act against you probably aren't doing it sophisticatedly in the way that you envision in your worst case scenario. Big companies have all the advantage, yet they slip up and give startups the opportunity to usurp them. They mess up all the time in positions that are impossible to lose if you actually take care to play optimally long term (see Valve in PC gaming for an example of the kind of dominance an incumbent can achieve if it actually plays well).
But I am afraid that this won't last for too long. Fast forward 10-20 years for business structures to adapt to AI, and as a startup founder, you'd probably find that all your competitors will have AIs that identify you as a threat and then make game theoretically optimal responses on their behalf almost instantly. Even if you had fresh ideas that give you an advantage, it'd probably not be enough to overcome their established moat and their money & AI compute advantage.
I think this mainly comes to the point about those who identify as rationalists being too stuck in their heads. Honestly for me I overthink "truth" over utility. I would delay certain actions or be uncertain because "how aligned with truth is it?".
Practically speaking, trying more is usually more indicative of success than overthinking. "Equal-Odds Rule" which is a rule established by Dean Keith Simonton states that the relationship between the number of successful ideas and the total number of ideas generated is constant. Basically, the more we produce the more we are likely to hit on the right thing. Now those who are not well trained in rationality would usually find more patterns in things that don't really have patterns. We have evolved to find patterns. Various studies show that people ascribe patterns to random situations, and we probably do that much more than we are aware.
As I believe rationality doesn't have an endpoint. No one can fully avoid false pattern recognition so that's impossible, but we can work on it as an art. The person trained in rationality would find more correct patterns and identify the false ones.
Those who don't overthink such matters usually end up successful in whatever they aimed at either from pure chance resulting from trying a lot or getting feedback on what works through real direct experience.
We could sit and theorize about all the true patterns and recognize them but there are people who are getting true actual feedback from testing things in reality, this usually leads to discovering what works, not necessarily the truth. Rational people usually are more inclined to truth rather than what works.
Ideally, we need to combine theory with practice, rationality with practicality, and strategizing with trying.
Panhandlers, e-girls and scammers are up against an unbeatable wall.
is this a natural category? panhandlers and e-girls offer services for money in a straightforward way. we might as well say "local coffee shops are up against an unbeatable wall. all of the agency is in the hands of the party with the resources."
1
1I think it's a natural category, yes, and that it also contains things like casinos, chiropractors, herbal medicine practitioners, psychics, etc.: it's the category of "pretending to provide a product/service in exchange for money, but the product/service is actually worthless (or entirely imaginary) and sometimes even harmful".
Beggars: you feel good about giving but you're doing vastly less good than if you'd just walked past the beggar and later donated the equivalent to UNICEF (or whoever). If the beggar were to spend your money on Fentanyl, giving might even be harmful.
E-girls: so-called "parasocial" relationships are essentially worthless mass-produced illusory entirely one-way relationships that provide none of the fulfillment, companionship, shared goals, team spirit, or mutual support that real relationships do. If the client were buying things (or sending money) they can't afford for the e-girl, or foregoing real relationships because of their perceived relationship with the e-girl, the parasocial relationship might even be harmful.
Casinos: essentially exist by offering you free money, allowing you an extremely brief dopamine hit from thinking you might get free money, and then just not giving you the money. At best it extracts billions despite generating essentially no useful products or services and having no practical, social or economic value. If the casino were to enable people to get into debt, or to create gambling addicts, it might even be harmful.
Chiropractors, herbal medicine practitioners, etc. essentially claim, even if only deniably/implicitly, they can treat medical conditions they actually have no ability to treat. If the patient were to choose not to see a proper, qualified doctor because they consider the chiropractor sufficient, or they couldn't afford to pay a doctor in addition to paying the chiropractor, chiropractic might even be harmful.
(I actually happen to agree with you that coffee shops are basically in the same category; I think coffee serves no functions besides "temporarily abating your craving for coffee" and "temporarily making you as alert as you'd be if you didn't drink coffee", and that people who claim to like the taste, the smell, or the experience of sitting on an angular pine chair in a hot and malodourous coffee shop are actually experiencing some sort of arabican Stockholm Syndrome.... but I suspect I might just be in a minority on this point and that most people would say that coffee shops do in fact provide a genuine product/service in exchange for your money...)
Casinos: essentially exist by offering you free money, allowing you an extremely brief dopamine hit from thinking you might get free money, and then just not giving you the money.
gambling is an efficient way (for some) to purchase a thrill for money, similar to attending a sporting event. the fact that they can win money is necessary, but they're under no illusion that the roulette wheel is a sound investment.
this task you've set yourself... it's not a hard game to play:
non-fiction books: the "learning" that some claim is dubious at best -- what facts remain when the page is turned, let alone when a month has passed? at worst, learning replaces "doing" and so these books are actually harmful. they sell the illusion of "discovery" or "knowledge", but ultimately provide neither: discovery requires engaging with the world with your own two hands. and "knowledge" -- if it's even valuable -- is better gained from wikipedia.
if you declare by fiat that these goods have no intrinsic value, then the consumption of them is absurd. more useful is to argue that the preferences these goods satisfy are more competitively satisfied in other ways. but note that this might not be true! e-girls are cheaper than dating. what if the preference really is "attractive woman says my name on stream"?
some sort of arabican Stockholm Syndrome
i get that you're being humorous -- and "arabican Stockholm Syndrome" is a wonderful phrase -- but it seems a very impoverished view that "anyone who purchases something i wouldn't is lying about their preferences."
Gambling: good point - this really made me think! I'm not sure you can have it both ways, though; you seem to be saying that the gamblers know full well that they'll lose money therefore it's a fair purchase of thrills in exchange for money - but that the thrill comes from believing they might win money? If the gamblers truly know that they're going to lose money then there'd be no thrill, and if they don't know they're going to lose money then they're not making a fair purchase.
Scott Alexander calls it something along the lines of "exploiting a known-failure of dopaminergic reward circuits whereby some negative outcomes produce the rewards associated with positive outcomes". I don't think sporting events exploit this same sort of failure. Even (for example) Cleveland Browns fans, who know from vast experience that their team is going to lose, still get their dopamine from the ancient sense of belonging that comes with being with one's "tribe" (and wearing one's tribal colours, chanting one's tribal chants, etc.); the personal satisfaction from loyally supporting their team win-or-lose; the aesthetic appreciation of the good plays and spectacular moments, etc. etc.
Perhaps one way to resolve the cognitive dissonance would be to posit a supremely wealthy gambler such that he found winning exciting but losing had no material downside for him; then the trade, though equally loss-making financially, would still be in his favour overall? Unfortunately, even if this works, I think such people would still only represent a tiny minority of gamblers, with addicts gambling away their paycheque being considerably more common.
[Completely irrelevant side note I just thought of, please disregard: is "roulette wheel" tautological? I admit I don't know as much French as I should, but "roulette" seems as though it ought to mean "little wheel"..?]
Non-fiction: (This also made me think a great deal!) I think this is a compression of a biaxial state-space into a single Boolean value. One axis (let's say the x-axis) represents the usefulness of the book in question, such that a book with a high x-value is very useful and lots of people have learned alot from it; the other axis represents how good a particular person is at learning by reading books, such that a reader with a high y-value is able to learn and retain a great deal from the books they read. I think you're compressing this down to a Boolean: "Are [all] non-fiction books useful to [all] people?". I think there are enough high-x books and high-y people out there that lots of non-fiction book reading yields actual learning: in other words, a substantial portion of the state-space represents a positive-sum transaction.
If we wanted to apply the same biaxial system to gambling, e-girls, etc., my claim would be "All instances of the product/service are extremely low-x. Therefore, regardless of which instance a person chooses and regardless of where the person is on the y-axis, the transaction is essentially always a loss". There might be some extreme weird outliers who have such stratospherically high y-values that the extremely low-x is compensated for (my "super-wealthy gambler who doesn't even notice losses", your "person who really does prefer having their name said by a pretty girl on the internet over genuine romance") but the vast majority of the state-space represents a trade for a worthless product/service.
E-girls: Consider the value of dating (love, romance, companionship, a fighting chance at eternal happiness) versus the value of sending money to an e-girl (a pretty girl reads your name off a list). Saying the e-girl is cheaper is a bit like saying a lump of coal is cheaper than a BMW: it might be cheaper in an absolute sense, but what matters is its cost relative to its worth.
Also, as a separate point, I'm not sure sending money to an e-girl even *is* cheaper than dating? If dating means "spending substantial sums of money on somebody in order to convince them to like you" I agree that would be a transaction more expensive than (whilst similarly worthless to) the e-girl transaction - but I think that's a gross misconstrual of what dating is for and how it should work. Instead we should think of dating as "Doing the stuff you want to do anyway, except with somebody you fancy instead of by yourself and/or with people you don't fancy": considering it opportunity-cost-wise in this way, I don't see why dating need necessarily cost any more than not-dating?
"if you declare by fiat that these goods have no intrinsic value then consumption of them is absurd"
I agree - but I don't think either of us are making such a declaration: rather, I'm claiming that casinos are worthless because they essentially just offer you money and then don't give it to you, e-girls are worthless because they offer the parasocial illusion of a relationship but no actual relationship, and your book example [which I understand that you use to show the absurdity of the argument rather than because you really consider books worthless] claims that books are worthless because they offer to teach you stuff but you don't actually learn anything. In each case there's a coherent argument for why the thing is worthless, not a simple declaration by fiat, and we can usefully debate whether each case's argument holds. (I admit this might not be true of coffee....)
Coffee: (thanks!) Yes, you're right. It's an absolute failure of imagination on my part. There are plenty of things I don't happen to like but I can nevertheless bring myself to believe that other people do like (folk music, board games, Netflix dramas, SUVs.. the list is practically endless..) and there are plenty of things I can think of as unpleasant-but-potentially-useful (taking out the bins, washing the dishes, basically all of politics..) but somehow with coffee it just seems so utterly useless and wholly unpleasant that I have a complete failure of imagination and can't even conceive of other people as liking it. I fully understand that this is a problem on my end! However: it must be said that Stockholm Syndrome sufferers aren't lying about their preferences, as you imply - rather, they genuinely have developed a mysterious, honestly-held preference for something that they hitherto really disliked and that is actively trying to hurt them.
hi, thanks for the reply.
If the gamblers truly know that they're going to lose money then there'd be no thrill, and if they don't know they're going to lose money then they're not making a fair purchase.
they expect to lose money. the uncertainty is the point. they trade expected value for increased variance.
when i buy a lotto ticket, i expect to lose a dollar. but it's still fun to fantasize about what will happen if i win big.
Also, as a separate point, I'm not sure sending money to an e-girl even *is* cheaper than dating?
it obviously is, in terms of time, money, risk, ... . some people may be at a time in their life where the transactional nature of the e-girl relationship is valued for its simplicity.
I think this is a compression of a biaxial state-space into a single Boolean value. [...]
look, overall, i really disagree with this whole paragraph. it seems your project is still to appeal to some objective morality, which can determine for us whether each person's actions are good or bad. that is, the value of a book is whether you learn from it; the value of a gamble is whether you make money; the value of an e-girl is whether you get married and raise a family.
my point is that this is an absurd way to look at the world. people engage in activities for any number of reasons. it is not up to us to decide on or evaluate those reasons.
"playing casino games is not an efficient way to make money! you'd be better off just not playing casino games!" <-> the conclusion here should not be "they are stupid/don't know themselves" but rather "they are getting something out of casino games that i don't understand."
of course, i'm happy with the argument "you are trying to make money; the casino is not a good way to do that." i'm happy with this since it engages directly with the actor's preferences, and tries to help them achieve those preferences better. good! a great service has been provided!
but the point is that this argument is saved by virtue of appealing to a specific actor. when we try to make it in general ("people in casinos are trying to make money; casinos are not reliable at that.") then it becomes bizarre, authoritarian, grim.
--
the original essay used this category as an example of "people who have no advantage in the marketplace, but are sometimes able to succeed." whether or not "charlatans, loose women, and the unpitiable poor" are a reasonable category (now expanded to include "gambling houses, witches, and quack doctors"), do you feel that it was the natural category to reach for to illustrate this point?
if so, why would a more neutral example -- like a coffee shop -- not work just as well?
Hey - same to you! Interesting discussion!
I think I understand your point - the gamblers know they will lose money, but they're willing to pay that money in order to have the dopamine hit from contemplating the chance that they might win; it's a fair exchange: money for dopamine hit.
My claim is not "gamblers must be trying to make money and gambling is a bad way to do that", my claim is "this particular dopamine hit is only possible because the casino is exploiting a kind of cognitive dissonance". Witness my engaging with your "sports event" comparison, where one also exchanges money in return for dopamine, rather than my proposing a comparison with something that's supposed to actually make money.
Note also that I only claim that the casino is providing a worthless service (that only seems valuable owing to the cognitive dissonance), not that it is morally wrong. Whether or not it is morally wrong seems to be a question of fact: are its patrons mostly wealthy people who can afford to lose the money, or addicts gambling away their paycheque? I suspect it's likely the latter, but I think this is a simple empirical question and, though very important for society, rather less interesting to debate with you than whether the casino's service has any intrinsic value (please take that as a compliment!)
The cognitive dissonance I'm talking about is, of course: the dopamine hit is only possible if you genuinely believe there's a chance you might win, but the casino patrons are supposedly entering a fair trade where they know full-well that the house always wins. To know that the house always wins and simultaneously believe sufficiently strongly that you might win to experience a dopamine hit is cognitive dissonance.
"The uncertainty is the point"
I agree: but the uncertainty (or if you prefer the increased variance) is the illusion: it feels like the outcome is uncertain but ultimately, for an ordinary person playing an ordinary casino game like roulette, the house always wins in the end.
I think buying a lottery ticket is actually a good illustration of this: you can't win the lottery. The chance of winning is so infinitesimal as to be effectively zero for all practical purposes. The chance of winning the USA Mega Millions lottery (odds 1 in 0.303 billion) is less than the chance of getting struck by lightning (odds 1 in 1.2 million) five time a week, every week, for a year. Winning that lottery is less likely than Earth being hit by three Chicxulub-sized extinction-causing asteroids (odds 1 in 0.1 billion per asteroid per year) in the same year. If we're willing to say that the chance of getting struck by lightning 250 times a year, or the chance of detecting three Chicxulub-sized asteroids on-course to collide with Earth in the same year, is so low as to be effectively zero for all practical purposes, in order to be consistent we ought to say that the chance of winning the lottery is similarly essentially zero.
Some lottery players might simply not understand the maths, and think they have a chance of winning that's effectively nonzero (instead of just technically nonzero in some abstruse mathematical sense that's irrelevant for all practical purposes). I'm not really interested in those players here. I'm interested in lottery players who do know their chance of winning the lottery is effectively zero - but play nevertheless because, despite knowing this, they still experience a dopamine hit that can only come from from actually believing they might win. Are these players entering into a fair trade? I think that's the interesting question. I'm entirely open to considering alternative theories (perhaps there's some other source of dopamine? Perhaps there's some reward system that explains gamblers' behaviour other than dopamine*?) but currently I think the only explanation for the two thoughts the lottery players simultaneously hold is that the players are experiencing cognitive dissonance, and that the lottery is exploiting the cognitive dissonance, and thus it's not a fair trade.
(*Though a non-dopamine explanation would need to A) explain gamblers' behaviour - gambling for endless hours upon hours in casinos, physiological arousal, developing addictions, etc. etc. - and B) survive psychiatrists' dopamine-based explanations)
"the transactional nature of the e-girl relationship is valued for its simplicity"
This doesn't get around the need for the relationship to have some actual value. If "simplicity" is a final value then "no relationship whatsoever", with an e-girl or otherwise, would be simpler still. Simplicity is only instrumentally valuable if it gets us to the things we actually value: my claim is that almost everybody seeks relationships because they value company, companionship, romance, affection, care, etc., and almost nobody enters into relationships because their final value is "pretty girl reads my name off a list". I agree that if some unusual individual genuinely does only want "pretty girl reads my name off a list" then an e-girl would be a considerably simpler way to get it than dating pretty girls in real life and drawing-up lists for them to read.
"[sending money to an e-girl] obviously is [cheaper] in terms of time, money, risk
Again, what matters isn't the absolute cost, but the cost relative to the worth of the thing. A lump of anthracite is obviously cheaper than a sports car, but that doesn't mean you're getting better value out of the coal than you would out of the car. So, let's consider it separately in terms of time, money, and risk:
Time: I just DDG'd "e-girl streams" (heaven help me) and clicked a result at random. The streams were between one hour twenty minutes and four hours long, with the average sitting at about two and a half hours. (I was particularly impressed with the 3h 50min masterpiece, "[girl's name] eats macaroni cheese"). I admit the average stream is probably shorter-duration than the average (successful) date - but only because people are decidedly not optimising their dates for time-efficiency. If somebody really cared about the time-efficiency of their relationships, could they fit a date into less time than it takes to experience "girl eats macaroni cheese"? Absolutely.
Money: I've already covered this with the argument in my previous message that when you take into account opportunity cost dating doesn't have to cost money, but let's consider a couple of specific examples:
i) Let's say you're a foodie and you love restaurants. There's a restaurant that costs £50 per head. If you're not dating anybody you might go there with friends, or even alone if you're really into it - and in any case, it'll cost you £50. Then you go home and spend £5 to get your name read out live on "girl eats macaroni cheese". Total cost: £55. If you're dating, you might go to the same restaurant with your date, instead. This also costs you £50 (or, perhaps you pay for your date too, and it costs you £100 - but then next time you go out she pays, bringing the net cost back down to £50). Total cost: £50; £5 less than the e-girl route.
[Obviously if you're not a fan of restaurants and if it weren't for having to do dates there you'd rather just avoid restaurants entirely and save the £50 altogether, feel free to replace "restaurant" with whatever it is you would like to do for it's own sake. Visit the cinema, go bowling, watch a football match, ride a motorcycle, fly a hot-air balloon, whatever.]
ii) Now let's say you've met the absolute love of your life, but you're a pauper and you want to spend as little as possible on the date. You decide to go for a stroll in the moonlight but, to be chivalrous, you offer to pick your date up and drop her home again afterwards. She lives ten miles away. The moon is generally open to being looked-at for free, and a twenty-mile drive costs around £5 in petrol. A fair comparison for this might be some promotional/introductory/whatever e-girl stream that, like the moon, is entirely free (as opposed to the average price of an interactive stream, which DDG says is about $5 USD per hour). Actually I don't think that's an entirely fair comparison, since the free stream is probably a loss-leader but the moon is unlikely to introduce subscription-gated tiers in future phases but nevermind, let's be generous. In total the e-girl experience has cost you £5 less overall. But - I think it would be an extraordinarily rare person who doesn't consider a stroll with the love of their life in the moonlight to be worth £5 more than "girl eats macaroni cheese".
Risk: This is the one I'm least sure about. What sort of risk are we talking about, here? Are dates dangerous in any significant way? Basically everybody I know, old and young, rich and poor, male and female, seems to go on dates all the time with few-to-no negative consequences. What thing happens on dates that's so terrible that it's preferable to stay inside and spend every night at home alone on your computer instead?
Also, I suspect that women probably experience a lot more risk on dates than men? If so, this would be a powerful argument against the idea that people use e-girls as a risk mitigation measure, since women make up a minuscule fraction of paying e-girl clients despite having the most real-life-date risk. I suppose you could argue for a general principle that leaving the house and doing anything is always more dangerous than staying inside, alone - but by this argument we should replace everything with a virtual equivalent and never leave the house for any activity of approximately equal risk to going on a date.
"it seems your project is still to appeal to some objective morality, which can determine for us whether each person's actions are good or bad. that is, the value of a book is whether you learn from it; the value of a gamble is whether you make money; the value of an e-girl is whether you get married and raise a family"
That's not at all what I'm claiming! Firstly, it was you who offered the "books are worthless because you can't learn from them" argument (and thus you who implied that books have a specific purpose, which is to teach people things)! I only responded by showing that a biaxial system models the question of whether people can learn from books better than your proposed Boolean. Secondly, my claim is not "gamblers must be trying to make money and gambling is a bad way to do that" but "the dopamine hit one gets from gambling is only possible because the casino is exploiting a kind of cognitive dissonance" (see above for the full argument). Thirdly, I said that the value of a romantic relationship was "love, romance, companionship, a fighting chance at eternal happiness"; I didn't mention getting married or raising a family at any point. I don't think it's unreasonable to evaluate romantic relationships by how much love, companionship, etc. they offer you. Fourthly, we're not discussing morality at all. All the questions about the value of the goods/services being exchanged can be expressed in entirely economic or game-theoretic terms, without bringing morality into it. (eg. you can replace "fair trade" with "positive-sum trade", etc.). I agree that there are some interesting morality questions downstream of the questions about the value of casinos, e-girls, etc. - but for the discussion we've been having, whether or not there's an objective morality is irrelevant.
Finally, "people engage in activities for any number of reasons" and "it's not up to us to decide or evaluate those reasons" are (I'm sorry to say!) wholly a cop-out. Of course it's completely true that people engage in activities for any number of reasons - but it's still perfectly valid to say that, on the whole, people typically read textbooks to learn things from them, and it's still perfectly valid to evaluate how good a textbook is by how much one can learn from it. By your argument nobody should ever evaluate the efficacy of anything, nor ever show any curiosity about other people's motivations.
"when we try to make [the argument] in general ("people in casinos are trying to make money; casinos are not reliable at that.") then it becomes bizarre, authoritarian, grim"
If I understand you correctly here (please do correct me if not!) you seem to be saying that because all the people involved in any institution might all have different motivations/preferences, to argue that the institution might not have any value to society is bizarre, grim, and authoritarian?
If so: Even though I'm not claiming that people in casinos are trying to make money, I want to defend the principle that some institutions can be on net worthless (or even harmful) and that society is within its rights to question whether the institution should be permitted or not on that basis. Throughout history (and, unfortunately, geography) there have been some really quite horrible institutions, and I don't think they can be defended because we can't know for sure the exact motivations and preferences of all the people involved. Our ability to ask meaningful questions about the value of an institution survives the problem of our being unable to evaluate the preferences of every stakeholder in two separate ways, either of which would be sufficient:
1) There are often a sufficient number of actors whose preferences are sufficiently legible that we can make reasonable generalisations. Perhaps not every single person at the musical 'Wicked' is there because they want to see 'Wicked'; perhaps one attendee is a boyfriend who was dragged along entirely against his will (this example might be very slightly autobiographical..) - but it would still be reasonable to say that most people who went to the musical went because they wanted to see it, and that if, ten seconds before it was due to start, the entire cast walked off-stage and quit musical theatre to become coal miners, the experience would in general have less value for the audience in general than the counterfactual where the cast enacted the musical. This isn't some authoritarian reduction of all musical-goers to identical mindless drones, it's making reasonable deductions about people's preferences from their observed behaviour - in other words, it's economics.
2) Just as it's not possible to observe the behaviour of individual particles experiencing Brownian motion within a cup of tea but it is possible to observe that the tea will exert pressure on the cup, even if it weren't possible to observe the preferences/motivations of any individual stakeholder within an institution it would still be possible to observe the effects of the institution on its surroundings. We can still say "Before there was a casino here there was 90% less gambling addiction, and after they built a casino here gambling addiction increased by 90%". Arguing that, in this case, the casino caused the gambling addiction isn't an authoritarian reduction of all casino-goers to identical mindless drones, it's a reasonable causal theory based on statistical treatment of observations.
"do you feel that [charlatans etc.] was the natural category to reach for to illustrate this point?"
Actually, I'm not sure this was the natural category to illustrate the point, and I'm not entirely sure why @WalterL selected it. A couple of theories:
1) It might have just happened to be the first category that sprang to mind. I'm sure you'd be the first point out that everybody's mind works differently!
2) It might be that most examples are negative/pessimistic, putting the reader in the "no advantage in the marketplace" category, and WalterL wanted to offer more hopeful examples where the "no advantage in the marketplace" group were the average reader's adversaries (or, at least, hostile to the reader in some way; I believe the word "prey" was used..), hoping to thereby empower or motivate the reader.
What I do claim, however, is that they are a natural category: they are all things that essentially work the same way in that they purport to give you a thing but then instead give you but a shallow illusion of it. With casinos (and vastly, uncountably more so for lotteries) there's no real chance of beating the house, only an illusion of it. With e-girls there's no real relationship, only the illusion of it. With chiropractors there's no real medicine, just the illusion of it. And so on.
"Charlatans, loose women, and the unpitiable poor"
Crumbs, that's an incredibly eloquent phrase! I find myself wondering whether that was your own - or Dickens', or perhaps Chesterton's (and I hope you'll take that as a compliment, too!)
1
I think smart people try things less often than they should, because of a cached mental pattern where you think of what might go wrong, and you find a foolproof countermeasure on the part of some antag, and so we call it off.
Stockfish, playing itself, might as well resign from the first move if you force it to give knight odds. Sensei(the Go AI), should do the same when it has to give 6 stones. Getting ready to go into the stock market, do I really think I have some edge that Adderall swilling quants and their AI pets haven't already priced in? (The pricing in, of course, is also priced in).
And yet Stockfish could wipe the floor with the breathing populace with knight odds. Sensei regularly beats kyu players with 6 stones (or would, if one could find a kyu player who isn't running the AI on their other tab), and my modest portfolio of index funds made me money last year. (But not provably more than....)
The robots, of course, are just benefiting from their imperfect adversaries mistakes. They play in a losing situation because, over time, their foes will crumble and ruin their own shots. That is, despite their situation being hopeless, they do not resign, and profit thereby. This generalizes quite a bit.
Panhandlers, e-girls and scammers are up against an unbeatable wall. Their prey has the opportunity to simply walk by / not click. There is no counterplay on their part that can save them. All of the agency, all of the volition, is in the hands of the party with the resources. Should they decline and move on, that's it, game over.
And yet, such individuals still succeed, from time to time. Despite their powerlessness, despite their timeworn approach, someone would love to help the Nigerian king move his money.
True story, a long time ago, when Netflix was first rising up, I got a big chunk of its stock. I sold it, because, after all, mailing CDs to people can't possibly be the future! They were pursuing a ridiculous course of action, and surely they would be outcompeted by someone less silly.
The bumblebee, of course, flies anyway, and my derision only impoverished me, Netflix made out just fine. Doing a dumb thing outcompeted sneering at those who did a dumb thing, once again. (Insert Uber comparison here)
What I'm sort of gesturing at here is the basic notion that taking action succeeds more than it 'ought' to. Red Team rarely has its act together (through no virtue of our dauntless heroes), and you may skate by.
Smart people have a tendency to enjoy the if/then of it all, the play and counterplay of how the game theory could work out. (If I play Rock, he will play Paper, so I should play Scissors after initially signalling Rock, but of course he'll know that my initial signal has no incentive to be accurate, and therefore he might read my read and...) But from what I've seen, in the actual way the world operates, countermove is very rare. Counter-counter-move is all but extinct.
You can, to steal a phrase, just do things. They might fail, but I suspect that if you are concerned about failing due to adversarial interference you may be overestimating its likelihood.