Gambling, Compassion, and the Probability of Suffering

One of the most fascinating chapters in Nate Silver's The Signal and The Noise comes after he's talked baseball and politics and weather.   For two years, Silver was a professional gambler.  Meaning he quit his job at a prominent accounting firm, and lived entirely off of his winnings from poker.

From his own account, he was pretty good at it.  For a while, at least.   This was in the early days of internet gambling, when it was wild and unregulated and free.   Texas Hold 'Em was his game of choice, and as poker is not entirely random like roulette, someone with Silver's self-discipline and focus was able to make a great heaping mound of cash.

His knowledge of human behavior, his skills at analyzing probability spreads, and his relentless focus on self-correction and learning meant that in those two years, he walked away from internet gambling with a total net of around $400,000.   He wasn't the best at the game.  He calculates his skill as being ninetieth percentile on a good day.

But he did well.  And he knew when to walk away, because when US regulations clamped down on online gambling, it got untenably harder for Silver to make a living at it.   Why?    Silver chalks it up to the nanny state, driven by moralizing Republicans.

Using longitudinal data provided by several major internet gambling sites, Silver was able to quantify this.  For gambling to be profitable for those in the top 20% of gamers, Silver writes, there need to be "fish."  Fish are people who are for crap at poker, but are too blind to their own incompetence to realize it.   Internet gambling...wide open, easy access, 24/7...was like open sea drift net fishing, or tossing explosives into a well-stocked trout pond.  "Fish" came in vast schools, and the pickings were...well, like shooting fish in a barrel.

With that as the dynamic, gambling could be remarkably lucrative for the two top niches.    Silver objectively analyzed how each of the deciles (meaning, each 10% category relative to losses/winnings) fared during his period of success.  What he found was that 80% of folks who played lost, and only folks in the top 20% broke even, with only the top 10% really doing well.  He also observed the losses growing exponentially as you moved further down the food chain.  This was important, because as Silver analyzed the data, the catastrophic losses of the bottom 10% of players are what make gambling profitable for people at his skill level.

These are the addicts and the incompetents and the delusional souls...and as they bleed out everything they own, their lifeblood is the fertilizer for the rest of the system.   Remove the suckers from the system, and the window of predictable profitability narrows, to only about the top five percent of gamblers.

When the "fish" were driven away by legislation, Silver found the going a lot harder, and after one disastrous night when he lost over $75,000, he abandoned the pursuit entirely.   Silver saw that legislation as destroying the probability of profit.  As a rational actor able to protect his own self-interest, that reduction in probability made gambling too high-risk to be a viable primary source of income, and he knew when to fold 'em.

But reason and compassion are not the same thing.

Reading that same data, I also saw it probabilistically, but in a different way.  Instead of self-interest and profit as a primary ethic, I ask: What is the probability of a particular action inflicting harm and suffering?

I have friends who gamble, and who enjoy it, and whose lives are viable.  But I've also known "fish."  They've been hardworking people, generally.  They've tended to be idealists and dreamers, and their grasp of their own place in reality has been filtered deeply through their own dreams.   From that place, they've done huge and lasting damage to their relationships and their lives, as that delusional conviction that luck is just one big wager away has destroyed them.

I've seen it turn brother against brother, watched as gambler-boyfriends have lied and betrayed, or connived to get widows to second-mortgage their homes because that one score was just a card away.

As a pastime, it's fine.  But as an industry?   It is an industry where the product is an 80% chance of loss, and whose profitability is reliant on the catastrophic financial losses of its bottom decile.

Understanding ethical behavior towards other sentient beings probabilistically, I see in "gaming" an industry that vastly increases the probability of loss and suffering.   As I am painfully aware of my own limitations, I stay away from it.  Giving you a dollar for the thrill of getting twenty cents back just doesn't strike me as entertainment.

But I also stay away from it because, as Silver objectively observes, it systemically violates the core ethic of my faith.

As a rational Christian in a probabilistic universe, my aim is to reduce the probability of suffering.  When Jesus asked us to be "fishers of men," finding easy marks was not what he meant.

Peace, Be Still

Modern life can be a cluttery overscheduled whirlwind.  Wednesdays, and today in particular, was on the nutso side.  Leaving the office after five, I trucked over to pick up my youngest son from Hebrew School.  Normally, that would include picking up my oldest son, but he was in a school play, from which his grandparents were retrieving him.  I then spent 40 minutes on the Beltway at the height of rush hour, got home, fed and crated the dog, and then took the little guy to drumming, which involved another 25 minutes in the car. 

With him dropped off, I drove to the mall to pick up a camo shirt for the big guy, who needed it as a costume for the role he'll play tomorrow.  On the way back, I hit a Whole Foods to get organic milk and eggs.  Then Magruders, for some more sanely priced groceries.  The little guy bopped out of drumming at nine, and we popped into Subway for a bite.  We got home at twenty-to-ten.

This is what it means to be a suburban American.  Is crazy, yes?  Our culture could use a little bit of slowing down and catching it's breath.

Which is why I can't quite grasp the resistance to the Moment of Silence law in Illinois.  The state legislation has been stalled out as it wended it's way through the court system following a challenge from an angry atheist activist, and is more accurately titled the Silent Reflection and Student Prayer Act.  It provides for a time of quiet reflection at the beginning of the day.  What it does not do, in any way, is mandate any practice other than silence.  As the law is written, it says the time "...shall not be conducted as a religious exercise but shall be an opportunity for silent prayer or for silent reflection on the anticipated activities of the day."

This works great if you're a person of faith.  We know how to use that time to get centered in our Creator.  This gives us that time we need to be still and know.

But if you're not a person of faith, it's still a good thing.  Sitting back, being analytical, and organizing your thoughts...these are essential characteristics of any focused, reasoning human being.  Even the most committed atheist might find their capacity for thought improved by just holding still and letting their neurons be optimized by the otherwise imperceptible tickle of His Noodly Appendages.

Yeah, the law mentions prayer, which works for the 80-plus percent of us who believe and freely practice our religion.  But the law gives equal airtime and respect to the secular virtue of reasoned, measured reflection.

I just can't see either harm in it or any meaningful violation of the church and state separation that is so vital to our freedom.

Compassion and Peace On the Planet of the Apes

One of the ways I tend to feel closest to God's presence in my admittedly rather feeble prayer life is by practicing self-emptying. Through stillness, song, or walking meditation, I try to still my endlessly nattering inner commentary. When that happens, which tends to be in little flickers here and there, I find myself feeling increasingly centered and deeply calm. I feel connected to that which transcends me, and to everything around me. Those moments are a delight.

The other day, after just such a moment, I found myself reflecting upon that state of being. In particular, I found my returning higher functions wondering if the silencing of my internal narrative represented a retrogression of sorts. When all I am is sensory inputs in the absence of any discernable thoughts, is that in some way analogous to the existence of "lower" forms of life? Creatures that exist in the absence of any language or symbolic forms of self expression must experience life in a similar way, being deeply and unreflectively in the moment.

Yet what struck me as peculiar about the act of meditation this week was that silencing my higher functions and seeking negation doesn't light up my...ah...more...um...animal self. I do not become more ferociously competitive, or hungrier, or so horny that me want to love you longtime. Those parts of me that are just a few genetic ticks away from having a bit part in Treachery and Greed on the Planet of the Apes aren't released when I let my "self" grow still.

I just feel more connected, more at peace and at one with others...and more compassionate. When faced with conflict or deeply troubled, these forms of prayer are where I go, and I come out of them not just mentally more level, but physically calmer. My body is involved in the process, and it is significantly impacted. But it is only when I still those higher functions, what I would typify as my reason or symbolic awareness, that I reach that elusive peak state of oneness.

This is a common understanding of the mystic wings of all of the world's significant faith traditions, yet it flies in the face of a common assumption. That assumption is the good ol' Cartesian split between mind and body. The idea...and it is a modern one...is that it is reason that balances and controls the snarling red-in-tooth and claw beast that lurks in our animal nature. Reason must be good. Our emotional and physical responses? They must be controlled and limited by reason.

But reason and intellectual rigor are not the answer. This comes as a great disappointment to my fellow Presbyterians. Both mind and body must be stilled, if we are to be opened to the self-emptying of a Christ-centered existence.