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Ludic Fallacy

en.wikipedia.org

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Re: Ludic Fallacy

#41

Post by basdftrewq »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #35
marvin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the central point here is that «assume that» is fine when working with a math problem, but can kill you in real life. If you’ve just lost two billion dollars, or killed 200,000 people in a preventable war, no one cares that the assumptions were reasonable.

Right, but the study has nothing to do with this, because the question was not in real life, but about a fictional scenario. "Assume you jump off a bridge. Would you be dead?" "No, because I'd change my mind. What, you think I'd jump off a bridge because someone tells me to?" "No, but I'd rather expect you'd assume it because I tell you, in the context of a hypothetical."

I think the point would be that expertise in those fictional scenarios doesn't correlate with expertise in real scenarios, and many experts only have been trained in fictional scenarios.

Re: Ludic Fallacy

#42

Post by Emphere »

Can't help but feel that people here are missing the point and perhaps too hung up on the specific example in the wikipedia article. The broader point is about the misuse and misapplication of technical/"rational" methods in real life i.e. not thinking about whether the model can actually be usefully applied in a certain real world situation. For example, blindly following rote statistical methods/not understanding their assumptions is what got us into the whole psychology replication crisis mess.

Re: Ludic Fallacy

#43

Post by thom »

yesenadam wrote: post #27
thom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in, he got another kickboxer to pretend to be him and fight in his place?

It's a fairly well-known trick where you play 2 strong players at the same time: You take the first player's move as white and play it yourself as white in the other game. So the two boards have the same position, with you playing different colours. That way you will have an even score in the 2 games. He did that with 4 pairs and the 9th was the head of the uni chess orgnisation, a weak player he beat easily.

Yes, I was just wondering if I was missing something about the kickboxing comparison, because presumably Tim Ferriss did actually fight more or less on his own merits?

Re: Ludic Fallacy

#44

Post by Reimersholme »

Emphere wrote: post #42

Can't help but feel that people here are missing the point and perhaps too hung up on the specific example in the wikipedia article. The broader point is about the misuse and misapplication of technical/"rational" methods in real life i.e. not thinking about whether the model can actually be usefully applied in a certain real world situation. For example, blindly following rote statistical methods/not understanding t…

Yes. One of the key points Taleb likes to make is that many real life situations are fat tailed, i.e. extreme events are much more likely than what someone assuming a normal distribution would account for, which might help explain why the financial system turns out to be so extremely fragile over and over again every time a major event/crisis occurs.

Re: Ludic Fallacy

#45

Post by Reimersholme »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #24

And yet companies make a fortune betting on markets or sports using those exact "Ludic Fallacy" models - like linear regressions, probability etc. They know it's real life, and many someone else is fixing the coin toss, but they can still get an advantage. In any real casino, 99 blacks in a row and they'd shut down the table.

...and then a financial crisis hits and suddenly they expect the government to bail them out because they didn't account for that risk in their models.

Re: Ludic Fallacy

#46

Post by thih9 »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #36

I haven't understood this as a fallacy. In the "suspicious coin" example, there is an opening assumption that the coin is fair, but it transpires clear evidence to the contrary. It isn't a fallacy to continue to treat this as a game: it has just become sensible to drop the assumption and treat it as a game where you are unsure about whether the coin is fair (as the second player in the example, in fact, does).

> In the "suspicious coin" example, there is an opening assumption

I understood it differently: there are no assumptions per se, just a request to make an assumption. The request is made by a third party and all this is part of the thought experiment.

> It isn't a fallacy to continue to treat this as a game

True. The article states that “The ludic fallacy here is to assume that in real life the rules from the purely hypothetical model (where Dr. John is correct) apply.”.

> treat it as a game where you are unsure about whether the coin is fair

This significantly modifies the scope of the original game.

I understood this as an example of how simplified models might easily stop being useful because of real life conditions.

Re: Ludic Fallacy

#47

Post by thih9 »

sudhirj wrote: post #5

The nicest example of this I've seen is that Tim Ferris won a kickboxing championship without being a kickboxer, https://www.martialdevelopment.com/how-to-win-kickboxing-wro... The fallacy is that winning a world championship at kickboxing must mean that you're an excellent kickboxer, but nope.

Is this verifiable? I saw a comment on that page saying:

> I’m not saying you couldn’t win a kickboxing tournament like that. I just think it’d be nice if he at least gave the year and location of the tournament so interested parties could look into it.

Re: Ludic Fallacy

#48

Post by misiti3780 »

dtjohnnyb wrote: post #39

The book Range talks about a similar idea, the idea of "kind" and "wicked" learning environments. In kind environments (most games) "patterns recur, situations are constrained, and importantly, every time you do something you get feedback that is totally obvious, all the information is available, the feedback is quick, and it is 100% accurate" In contrast, wicked environments (most of the rest of life!!!) none of the…

What did people think about that book ?

I enjoyed it but felt like it was a bunch of other peoples ideas (Taleb, Kahneman, Levitin, etc) strung together.

Re: Ludic Fallacy

#49

Post by gmuslera »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #36

I haven't understood this as a fallacy. In the "suspicious coin" example, there is an opening assumption that the coin is fair, but it transpires clear evidence to the contrary. It isn't a fallacy to continue to treat this as a game: it has just become sensible to drop the assumption and treat it as a game where you are unsure about whether the coin is fair (as the second player in the example, in fact, does).

That is the difference between a model and the reality. It "should" be fair, but in reality (with all the factors you see, and maybe several others that you don't) it seem to not be working that way.

Re: Ludic Fallacy

#50

Post by Ambol »

Reimersholme wrote: post #45
quickthrower2 wrote: post #24

And yet companies make a fortune betting on markets or sports using those exact "Ludic Fallacy" models - like linear regressions, probability etc. They know it's real life, and many someone else is fixing the coin toss, but they can still get an advantage. In any real casino, 99 blacks in a row and they'd shut down the table.

...and then a financial crisis hits and suddenly they expect the government to bail them out because they didn't account for that risk in their models.

Or they knew all along that the government would bail them out, so they were playing a very different game than everybody else.
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