The past few years I began to look around for books concerning evolution in practice. I had read a lot of Dawkins, Mayr, and Jared Diamonds books about evolution. However I wanted to switch from that type of learning to learning from people who were doing things where they used evolution in their everyday life. As far as I know Dawkins does not use evolution to think about the things he should and shouldn't eat, nor is he any type of doctor, geneticist, or grower that is using evoultionary ideas in his everyday life. His evolutionary life seems confined to academia. What I found in my search was a book about a man who was the quintessential evolutionary doer: T.V. Munson. His most famous work wasFoundations of American Grape Culture originally published in the early 1900's and still in use today.
I know for a fact Elmer Swenson, the pioneer of the Minnesota wine industry, used what he learned from Munson's book to begin adapting cold hardy grapes to the Minnesota climate. I have been to a few of the wineries/vineyards here in Minnesota like the Cannon Valley winery, and they are making some really excellent wines and growing great tasting grapes. I learned a rather good evolutionary principle by reading Foundations of American Grape Culture where he talks about how breeders will often take their "star" vines and hybridize them together, which Munson argues leads them towards greater and greater fragility. He argues that the best method of hybridizing is to match the vines that are strong at certain characteristics, with vines that compensate for areas in which the star vine is weak.
I would like to start growing my own vines in the next couple years. I started a garden for the first time last year with good success and my wife and I made our own wine this year(with purchased grape must) as we are just wetting our feet.
I want to learn about natural systems by doing. Louis Pasteur when he discovered germs and came up with his germ theory of disease wasn't a doctor, he was working for the French wine and poultry industries.
For any interested in learning about Munson, his only biography was written by Sherrie. S McLeRoy and Roy E. Renfro, titled The Grape Man of Texas.
There is really interesting passage from Foundation of American Grape Culture that I wanted to share that I think tells me a lot about T.V. Munson the person. He entitled it "Personal Qualifications Necessary in the Originator." Which he meant to mean those who would take up the practice of hybridizing and breeding grape vines. He said :
"This work requires not only theoretical knowledge, but also direct personal knowledge, experience, skill, and much of the intentive faculty, with greatpatience and perserverence, without the stimulus of money-making in it, for there is little to the originator. There is no law providing protection to the inventions(varieties) of an originator, as there is to the less meritorious mechanical inventor. The originator must have a great fund of enthusiasm, and an ambition to add somethingto the general fund of human development for the benefit of the world at large, and, that he may reap some some personal compensation, or enjoyment, he must have an intense love of close communion with nature, causing him to admire the infinite correlated life movement; to study the loves and hates prevailing in all organic life and growth, discovering the great fundamental turth in ethics, as well as in the development of organic bbeings, that love breeds life, hate breeds death."(pages 129-130 of Foundations of American grape Culture.
Most people don't know what they're talking about when they speak the words "variance" or attempt to do analysis. There are a lot of statistical Platonists out there, doing math based upon faulty assumptions, rendering their conclusions of little more relevance than if you were to go and ask a priest about your downswing(or upswing). Perhaps they should set up a confessional.
Is poker normal? For the last 20 years poker has been explained by classical ideas of statistics, the normal(or Gaussian) distribution, statistical mean and variance, based upon flipping coins. Yet there are things in poker which traditional theories have never quite been able to explain. Once winning players go on larger(and longer) than expected losing streaks, players win thousands and even millions from unexpected rich fish. These would have been labeled “outliers” and anomalies to the traditional theories, but upon closer inspection it appears that some of the applications of normality are fundamentally flawed.
I have been delving into statistical inference for awhile now; I have not shared what I have discovered from writers like Taleb, Hume, Popper, and most importantly the mathematics of Benoit Mandelbrot because I felt I had not yet understood it. Unlike many mathematicians, I worry about false precision.
The truth I have discovered is this. Many of the ideas of the normal distribution as they are applied to thinking about swings and risk in big-bet and internet poker are incorrect. True, the card distributions you receive will be normally distributed, however your poker results will be dependent, "fat-tailed", and may exhibit skew. The latter two I leave for a later explanation.
Dependence is an important idea, and it is one that can be analyzed. Over 50 years ago the Hydrologist Harold Edwin Hurst set about to build the dams along the Nile River, which were used to regulate water flow and irrigate the cotton fields of Egypt. The Engineers of Hurst’s day made the same assumption many mathematicians today would about the year to year deviations of rainfall. Independence. The amount of rainfall from year to year is simply random Brownian motion. They turned to the mathematics of coin-flipping to construct the height of their dam. They wanted to be able to store enough water to protect against drought, but also to hold water in a series of wet years. They gathered data on the past years average rainfall and jumbled it up, and found a bell curve. Luckily for the Egyptians, Hurst was an empirical scientist.
He examined the actual data and found that the year to year accumulations did not follow a normal distribution. The distinction was this; that if you took the predictions of an assumption of a normal distribution to the data, it would not predict correctly the highest accumulations, nor the lowest troughs. Jumbling up the data was philosophically corrupt, as the order of occurrence was paramount. The engineer’s assumptions would leave the dam height far too low. What Hurst found was a clustering effect, that wet years and dry years tended to occur together at a rate that wouldn’t be predicted by independence. This wasn’t exactly an entirely new observation.
“What God is about to do he showeth unto Pharoah. Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land or Egypt; and there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt; and the famine shall consume the land.” Gen 41: 28-40
Enter Benoit Mandelbrot, and what he calls “the Joseph Effect”, after the biblical character . It is the idea of long dependence and can be measured by a test called a rescaled range statistic and the Hurst exponent(H). H is a measure between 0 and 1 that assumes no underlying distribution of data. Rather it is test that asks the question, so what is the distribution of data?
Hurst gathered data, lots of it. He gathered records of rainfall from wherever he could find them. He examined not only the deviations of rainfall, but also the order of the occurrence of the rainfall and found the same thing over and over. Dependence.
So the obvious question is what relevance does this have for poker? Fast forward to the present day, with the internet poker boom, Poker Tracker, and an abundance of data and you will shortly see. When we play poker we build up bankrolls to play in certain games, and that Hurst’s task of building of a dam is similar to our building of bankrolls.
We can use the same equation Hurst did to test the distribution of our poker results. H = log (Range/standard deviation)/log(N/2). The range is the value difference between the highest and lowest accumulations and N is the number of points in the unit you measure your results in.
If normality was true the Hurst exponent for the data would be .5, indicating normal Brownian motion. A Hurst exponent of less than .5 would indicate that the data tend to keep doubling back on themselves. Yet he found and approximated that deviations in annual rainfall had an exponent of .74, which indicated the persistence of long runs.
Each hand movement today is likely to be recorded; both the dollar deviation and the order of occurrence. In all of the data I have analyzed on internet and big-bet poker I have found dependence(and an absence of normality), however in order falsify the earlier assumptions I need more data, which is why I am asking for it from 2+2ers.
It is quite easy these days to gather data and analyze, and so I understand why it may have been difficult to see some of these ideas past, however the continuance to adhere to an idea in the face of contrary evidence is against the principles of falsification and I believe of science, as outlined by the philosopher Karl Popper.
The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in the beauty of symmetry and the perfection of nature. They believed in ideals. For example they thought the height of the highest mountain had to equal the trough of the deepest depth of the ocean. This is not a view that corresponds to reality. The way that many fit a bell shaped curve to their view of reality, and poker results, has this same ideal at heart.
Some of the swings you go through have an independent and normal aspect to them, and these can be large; however those will all be cancelled out by the law of large numbers. If you look at the measure of your standard deviation, if these were the biggest cause of your downswings, this should converge relatively quickly, say a few thousand hands. However, everyone I have analyzed sees big fluctuations in their standard deviations and it never seems to settle down to anything. So why do you go through a variation of results?
I offer the following explanations as some alternative hypothesis for the reasons you experience deviations, apart from those of the normal distribution of cards.
The first is the way in which you deal with swings, and the way others respond to you. Poker players know this as tilt. If you play worse after losing a hand in which you were a statistical favorite, there will be a heavy dependency to your results. Hours and days later may still be thinking and making plays because of the path dependence of that hand. Your results in this case are not linked to the normal distribution, rather your response to it. This is also similar to the idea that a single butterfly flapping its wings in South America, can cause a hurricane in Florida, while the same butterfly wing flap a day later might not do anything. In this case the normal deviations were a cause of your downswing, but it was not the biggest cause.
The second factor is ecological luck, and I would stress this point. The opponents you are playing against, the amount of money they have, your access to games, are all aspects of luck that are far under emphasized by people that delve into "uncertainty" and then tell you about the deviations of the normal distribution.
Consider the following thought experiment. You are a winning Pot Limit Omaha player over the last few years and join a new site and employ your strategy. You are in luck as its quite effective against the majority of the players on the site. You win 20 buy-ins in the span of a month. Now think about this from your opponents’ perspective. The people who you are best against may now avoid you, they may adapt or they may go broke. The people and strategies you are now playing against are different than the ones you were playing against before. The tough part is that it’s so difficult to notice. You do not notice the big pots you would have won the previous month in the exact same "normal" situation if the other player was playing. You start losing, maybe due to some slight normal randomness of cards, maybe because you use the wrong strategy against someone. You make many of the same bets you did before, however this time maybe you get played back at, or your better hand reading opponents fold their losers and call your bluffs.
Before you know it you've lost 10+ buy-ins. You are stuck as to why. You go to the confessional of your local Gaussianist minister. He tells you about sample size, and the swings of the normal distribution, and although he has no evidence that this was the biggest cause of your losses, or even a cause, he assumes that is why, because that’s his belief. He does some math that you don't quite get, but he assures you, you'll be better in no time and regression to the mean will take care of everything. You feel a little bit better.
You go to poker tracker and find some "mistakes" that you have been making. Basically you adapt, or if you don't you'll go broke. You experiment with some new plays and think about what you are doing wrong. "Wrongness" and "rightness" can be such fickle phrases. Maybe the previous opponents you won so much against come into some money and start playing again and when you go back to the tables and employ your old strategy you win. Maybe you adapt, get better and win. If you do the process starts all over again. If you don’t you go broke.
Over time you seem to go through some rather large deviations and changes that your minister never predicted. One time you even have to switch game types, as no one seems to want to play that old game anymore. Everyone knows how to play it, and there’s a much more exciting game now.
What your minister didn't tell and what is the truth, is that you are involved in an evolving dynamic system. One in which past success does not guarantee future success, like effects may not produce like causes, and you can not make accurate long term predictions. The idea that your risks can be managed by, and that the area of luck you must be most concerned about is bell curve card deviations is a delusion. You must continually adapt your strategies to a changing environment and there can be a great amount of ecological luck and variance in your results.
panayz asked: "Paleo Dieter? Can you provide a definitive explanation, definition or describe what this term means in non confusing language.:)"
A paleo(paleolithic) dieter is one that eats based upon the principle that we are best adapted to eating the types of foods that our ancestors ate in the paleolithic period of our history(10,000+ years ago) and that many of the foods introduced since the beginning of agriculture produce short term and long term stresses that our hunter gather bodies are not used to.
I shall start posting my meals. I am going to include costs and potentially consequences as well. If I eat something and get sick now, or have an expense I can link with the initial meal I will factor it in later.
My general advice is to stick with meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Mimic combinations that are popular and that your are familiar with but cut out the potatoes/sugars/industrial oils. Drink water, coffee, and tea without milk or sugar. Go for bright colors and and good tastes.
Breakfast with prices:
Ham steak and eggs + grapes
Est cost for 2: $9.50
I drew this image recently after reading a wonderful book called How Dogs Think by Stanley Coren. The outer eye represents the human color spectrum and the inner the dog, or that is what we think dogs see based on experiments.
It is a translation of my view of the world to hopefully some semblance of what my
Jack Russel, Kirby sees. Dogs see the world mostly in yellow and blue, with some degrees of black, brown, and grey. I understand now why he often used to lose the orange and yellow tennis balls in the grass if he couldn't smell them. Basically they both looked like the same color. Dogs eyes turn red into black, green into a brown-yellow, purple into blue.
Unlike my vision which has been selected to see multiple colors(probably based on the dietary fruit gathering) my dogs vision has been selected to see better at night and while moving. Both of these abilities would allow him to better catch prey at night. While that is not how he currently puts food in his dish, it is worth understanding for a couple of reasons.
The fact that a dog can not see in color means that he/she has no evolutionary relationship with fruits and vegetables(they do have the taste receptors for them but their % of a canine diet would have been low. They would also not have participated primarily in the selection/rejection process). Canis loopus have always been carnivores and many of the current dog and people foods are on a long time scale, quite recent additions. Like many in our population dogs may also have difficulty with cereal grains, sugar, and processed starches. Yet these can be some of the main ingredients in commercial dog foods. I try my best to steer clear of those. Kirby eats mostly raw beef, chicken, pork and bones or organ meat. I occasionally give him some yogurt(the no sugar or corn syrup variety). His treats are cuts of chicken or duck jerky that you can get at target/cub foods. I occasionally give him fruits and vegetables. He likes purple cabbage andI now know he can see it as the color blue. He has never needed to go to the vet yet and is in good health. My wife often complains that our apartment looks like a graveyard. Well...maybe.
In the The problems of philosophy written by Bertrand Russell he asks "is there any knowledge in the world that is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? To make our difficulties plain, let us concentrate our attention on the table...if several people are looking at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same two distribution of colours, because no two can see from exactly the same point of view."
Yes consider the table. Seriously? Russell's concern over differences in seeing tables strikes me as eerily similar to mathematicians who worry about normal distribution deviations when there are more pressing concerns staring them in the face.
I remember the problem of whether we could trust that the table was "really" there being presented to me first when I was studying European history at high school. I remember thinking at the the time that it was a ridiculous notion, and I still think the the problem as defined by Russell is ridiculous, however his notion and methodology of doubting his senses is not. I appreciate the work Bertrand and intend to expand on the problem and re-frame it.
If there is a sense I am not going to doubt it is one that is very old taking in data and representing something that is inanimate and unadaptive. Variations in viewing tables between members of the human population are going to be small, so small as to not matter(barring those who lost their sight or are color blind). However if you take the the notion of doubting sight and put it the right environment, suddenly Russell's concerns become quite useful.
Dylan(a twenty something northwesterner) walks into his local supermarket. He is on the hunt for his weekly supply of food. The American supermarket is the perfect example of an environment that has catered to the over selection of sight. As Dylan walks down the aisles all the food looks quite delicious and much of it also probably tastes good. However much of what he sees is indeed in need of being doubted. The entire middle of the grocery store showcases not the actual food he is going to eat were he to purchase something from this section, but pictures on boxes of the food. Want to know what's in it? Well then read the label. Yes language will tell us everything! Except for the fact that language until recently has never been used as a tool of food selection. The words we use like calorie, fat, carbohydrate, etc. all say something about a food, but we seem to think that we can capture everything about something in a word. No sooner has the word been villified as it later seems to come through a redemption. Fat is bad, carbs are bad, calories are bad. Later it's Good Calories Bad Calories, some fats are good for you, or natural sugars(like those found in fruit) are good.
The whole thing seems an elaborate opportunity for deception. Have we ever thought that we should stop thinking in language about our food choices? Alas we need to to uncover the damage that has already been done.
As a paleo dieter/EF'er Dylan buys virtually nothing from the center of the grocery store. He has wisened up and learned to buy from the outsides. Less deception there but there is still the opportunity for some.
Consider this nugget of information from the pages of Bernd Heinrich's book Winter World "Fruit's nutritional content depends on the season for which their dispersal is tailored. Thus although the highest-quality(highest energy content) fruits contain fat and sugar, that food(especially fat) causes rapid fruit spoilage due to microbes. Low fat and sugar contents, as well as high acidity and low water content all help to prolong branch life.....The tomatoes we get at the super market may be a close analogy. They are selected for long-distance travel from California and long shelf life, unlike the garden variety we grow for taste. As with wild fruit the nutrients that make them taste good also cause their rapid spoilage, and our commercial varieties of fruits are selected, like many winter fruits, for longevity."
High acidity taxes the kidney to produce a countering balancing "base" substance from reserves. Dylan has learned that eating is a dynamic process of expending energy to gain energy. Winter fruit bears a short term cost(whatever energy Dylan's body has to direct to the kidneys that doesn't get directed elsewhere.)
So Dylan can not even use his rule "shop around the outside of the store" exclusively an be entirely confident in his senses. Some might add the rule "buy local", but even if a fruit is local you may not live in an area that can produce high fat fruit. So your local fruit will be selected for the ability to survive winter giving it the same sort of characteristics as those shipped from far away. What is the solution?
Dylan must learn to understand the dynamics of evolution, signaling systems and the ways in which people are consciously and unconsciously fooled by reality.
When selecting food Dylan needs to see bright colors and use his sense of taste to sense an acceptable fat/sugar ratio. Some parts of his mind may get the feeling that something is "too sweet" or "too tart". He also needs language to document, experiment, and remember the good and bad choices he has made.
He needs the knowledge that in evolution what works in some instances may not work as well in others. Perhaps shipping is fast enough in some instances so that the fruit he finds is of the good high fat variety. Perhaps some canned tomatoes, may be better at certain points of the year than those he could buy that are fresh. Perhaps during some periods he will have to intermittently fast.
As humans we have created an environment with the supermarket, where the dimension of selection is primarily sight and language. When you understand what some things have to go through in order to look good in that environment(versus similar fruit found in more natural settings), Bertrand Russell's Table suddenly becomes an interesting problem that you confront quite often. I have simply added some fruit on top of it.
The earliest drawings of humans that survive are of animals. Some suspect that they drew them as part of a ritual that they believed aided their success in hunting. Like our early day ancestors I have done the same. The picture above is a drawing I did in London in 2007. However I am not hunting actual black swans, rather figurative ones, like those described in the works of Nassim Taleb. I attempt to make choices that positively expose myself to events of large consequence.
Call me Luke. I come from Minnesota, where the daily and seasonal changes in weather variation are anything but normal. I studied actuarial science at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and graduated in 2005. I have an avid interest in ideas about risk management. I hunt for black swans in analyzing data and in trying to see why our current methods of analyzing risk miss the mark so badly.
Since my college days I have been a professional poker player. It was more by accident than conscious choice. I have learned more in experiencing variations and going back to the theories about them than I ever did learning the theories and trying to apply them to problems.
I lived in the UK for two years, one year studying and one year playing poker to support myself while my now wife Emma finished university. My time in England was the most unexpected and the biggest black swan of my life.
I am an avid EF'er(evolutionary fitness)/Paleo Dieter. It's a way of eating and training based on what we know about the foods and activites of our ancestors. I attended the March 2008 conference held in Las Vegas by Art DeVany(www.arthurdevany.com). I had read about Art in The Black Swan. I've been healthier ever since. I now use what I know about evolution and where we came from to make choices about strategies for better workouts in less time as well as maps for figuring out foods to eat and avoid. Many of our current medical problems are the result of our decisions(be they conscious or partially unconscious) and in order to maintain health requires a humility and recognition that many of our ancestors and even some in more primitive in environments are physically better off than we are. With the knowledge of the environments we came from I can eat and live in the world of today and try and minimize the risks of large negative consequences like diabetes. I'll write about foods I eat, exercises I do, foods I avoid.
Also in march I had the pleasure of meeting Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd(www.thankgodforevolution.com), who call themselves evolutionary Christians. For the longest time I never knew what to call myself. The debate about whether evolution was "true" or not had been in most of my life having an atheist father and christian mother. I see now that whatever words we use to represent something, that They are just the menu not the meal. They have reconnected me with my religious senses given me a map for translating ideas. We need the language of the day and night to understand our experiences. I think some of our senses like our moral sense gain better access to knowledge if its represented in the language of the night. I hope to post more thoughts that I have about this and would like start an evolutionary christian group in my area.
I was married to Emma in October of 08. I think some part of what I feel when love hits me is the sense that Emma complements my greatest weaknesses. I am forever grateful that she left the UK to come and live with me here in Minnesota.
It was a long hard process that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Watching her have to deal with USCIS and pure incompetence for months on end and not being able to do anything about was one of the most stressful experiences of my life.
We live in Bloomington, Minnesota with our Jack Russel Terrier Kirby. His health and development have become a big part of my life. I consider him my trainer in a way as he helps me to stay on the path of life similar to that of our more active ancestors. More than two hours at the computer and his look of "are we going outside now" prevents me from being American. His sense of playfulness and energy keeps activity fun. He is a paleo dieter as well, although of the canis loopus variety.
Emma and I are expecting our first child in March of 2010. We know its a girl and have named her Charlotte Jane. I am excited and grateful. I feel I have learned enough to ensure that she indeed will have a good chance at health and happiness. In many ways in America we are losing our ability to take care of other living things. In some ways it is happening almost unconsciously. There will be a lot of choices along her path that can carry some serious consequences, and if I don't know what to look for and how to respond to feedback it can be a tough road. Evolution, history, mathematics, love, strategy, a sense of where we came from as humans(from the stars!)and a philosophy of epistemology will be my guide. I hope to guide her and teach her about the world. Thanks for reading.
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