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Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?
by robocat 1y ago
Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?
- quantified 1y agoIt's an essential skill in life anyway, but you also teach the usual ethics and morals and come down hard on them when you catch them in a meaningful lie. You never got away with anything as a teenager?
- anitil 1y agoI think it's also considered a developmental milestone as lying requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, and an understanding of the perspective of another person
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- TZubiri 1y agoIt's a common misconception that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker. You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy. Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make
- ghostly_s 1y agoI’m not sure what meaningful distinction you think you're making between verbally lying and implicitly lying with your bet but it's quite tedious.
- gretch 1y agoYou inferred it, but it's not implied. Instead of thinking of a bet as saying "I have good cards" think of it instead as "I have an advantage in this pot", which is not a lie. In poker advantages can come from cards, or from other objective measures such as position, stack size. And of course from subjective measures like being able to read your opponent.
- c22 1y agoIf reading your opponent is a strategy that confers advantage then it stands to reason that deceiving your opponent is as well.
- gretch 1y agoThe original claim is that people misconceive "that poker is about lying or that you need to lie to play poker" Just because other people may try to lie to you, does not mean that you need to lie in order to succeed. No one said "lying can't be used at all"
- TZubiri 1y agoMy claim is a bit stronger, not only can you play without lying, but you don't sacrifice anything, you can play at top level without lying, and you gain no advantage by lying. In essence at optimal play you ignore whatever your opponent says, there is only the bets and game actions, which are independent from the cards held.
- kqr 1y agoSkilled players read their oppononts' hands (i.e. the cards they're holding), not the opponents themselves.
- marksimi 1y agoI feel one of the most useful skills picked up by poker that people don't explicitly speak about is managing your information effectively. Deceiving my opponent has the connotation of this happening in one instance. After you realize that you can't convincingly deceive your opponents in poker into perpetuity, it becomes a game of managing your image —revealing the right information while being conscious of information that you shared in the past (if you're playing someone skilled or perceptive, that is). On the flip side, what an excellent game to help people pay attention to signals, figure out how to weigh them appropriately, and appropriately act on them when the situation calls for it.
- cman1444 1y ago
- seizethecheese 1y agoIt’s not tedious at all. Many games have structural information asymmetry, and part of the fun is navigating this. To add an extra verbal lie is categorically different from playing within the bounds of the game
- djeastm 1y agoIf we replace the word "lying" with "deception" does that change anything?
- wrs 1y agoPoker players very seldom outright lie, like saying out loud "hey everybody, my hand is great!", and it's usually not just simple "deception" either. How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
- BoiledCabbage 1y agoSo you're trying to manipulate people into believing false things about you? Is that better or worse than calling it deception?
- bawolff 1y ago> How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"? I'd call that lying with extra steps. (Which to be clear, im fine with in the context of a game (and in certain contexts even in real life). Plenty of sports can be traced back to ritualized ways of practising to murder people. Take all the field sports of track and field)
- Talanes 1y agoYour definition seems like it would include the entire field of cryptography as lies, would it not?
- bawolff 1y agoI don't think cryptography usually results in an increased probability of your adversary making incorrect inferences relative to the base case of the adversary having no information. So no, i wouldn't say so. Maybe you can argue steganography is lying. Regardless, i also find the idea that lying is morally wrong reductive. Morality depends on context. There are plenty of cases where being misleading is morally ok in my opinion.
- thinkingtoilet 1y agoHa. I got news for you. They are going to learn that playing poker or not.
- striking 1y agoThe article ends > As a parent, I’m pleased that I’ve given her the tools to put herself through college hustling poker games, and then go work at a proprietary trading firm. which is presumably written with the same sardonic intent as any other Matt Levine work.
- bamboozled 1y agoThe world order is falling apart and being an intelligent person makes you a target of the "anti-elite". I think teaching kids strategy and deception has never been more important.
- jefftk 1y agoWhen my kids were maybe 6 and 4 we started playing One Night Ultimate Werewolf as a family. It very quickly became clear this was a bad choice: the oldest went from being terrible at lying (and so ~never doing it) to actually being pretty good, surprisingly quickly. As soon as we noticed this we stopped, and while she didn't go back to how she had been there was definitely much less lying and she didn't remain good at it.
- DrewRWx 1y agoDo you think she adopted her pokerface she learned it against you or was there another reason?
- jefftk 1y agoI think it's simpler than that: people get better at things with practice. Werewolf isn't like poker where people typically try to conceal their emotions and leak nothing; instead you're trying to act like you're on the Villager team regardless of whether you actually are.
- behringer 1y agoRemember, being a good liar means you can sniff out a lie too. It's not a terrible skill to teach if it can be wielded for good. Maybe a mafia style game would be more suitable where both sides are played.
- bko 1y agoI think it's balanced by having him or her learn skepticism, game theory, information asymmetry, and adverse selection, among other useful skills.
- blitztime 1y agoI’d say bluffing in poker isn’t really lying. I mean you certainly can look at it that way, but another way to look at it is “I have good hands here more often than you do so here strategically you have to fold when I bet”
- jayknight 1y agoThe difference between a lie and a surprise is that soon everyone will know what the surprise was. A lie has the intention of concealing the truth forever.
- cman1444 1y agoWell I guess you better hope your kid kindly shows their hand after you fold to their shove.
- kqr 1y agoCorrect, and a bluff is not intended to last forever. Bluffing is revealed eventually, because you can only have a pair of aces so often, statistically speaking. At that point, the table awareness of the bluff is still profitable because it forces others to bet into your strong hands. A bluff that is revealed is just as good as one kept secret. Many people seem to misunderstand this.
- Talanes 1y agoWe tell plenty of lies that aren't intended to hold up forever — whether it's a lie to a stranger that you hope to be away from before the lie becomes apparent, or a lie to a acquaintance that you hope is small enough that the social friction of confronting you over it would be worse than the lie.
- tasuki 1y ago> A lie has the intention of concealing the truth forever. Is that a thing... in English? Or in some specific part of the world?
- bawolff 1y agoI'd be more concerned about encouraging gambling. Bluffing and detecting bluffing is a useful skill as long as used morally. Sort of like learning martial arts - just because we teach kids karate doesn't mean we want them to go around beating people up. Gambling however can very easily ruin lives and be very adicting.
- kqr 1y agoAs someone else pointed out, bluffing is not lying. Bluffing is about applying some randomness to your betting patterns to force your opponents into overbetting slightly on average. Lying would be trying to introduce a negative correlation between hand strength and bet size; bluffing is merely removing some of the positive correlation that exists.