That's just plain stupid. Is everyone who drinks beer occasionally because they like it an alcoholic? No. Is everyone who enjoys going to a casino occasionally a gambling addict? No.
I agree, mostly. But with games like poker (are there other ones available in casinos?) where you play against other gamblers and not against the house, it is reasonable to play for money.
The gambler's axiom is "the house always wins", and this is why you shouldn't be there to make money with most games. Most casino games, the house's win is your loss. But it's not so with poker. With poker, the house always wins because it takes a percentage of each pot. But you can still win even while the house is winning. If you're a consistently good poker player you can very reasonably come in and make money at it. The same is not true of other casino games like slots, blackjack, or whatever else. With those, the odds are always tilted against you no matter what you do (unless you count cards or otherwise cheat). But in poker, the odds depend on how your skill compares to the other players.
But of course you're right about all the other games. And if you don't possess good poker skills then your idea holds true for that as well.
Disclaimer: I don't play poker, I've only read about it a bit, and I don't gamble.
I suspect that it is because our 'minds' include something more than just material--something akin to a soul. We can see on a 'meta' level that mere machines cannot.
I'm sorry, but I view this on the same level as I view people who believe that dancing in a certain fashion will make it rain.
Something is known to be true if there is proof for it. The only place where "soul" enters into things is in choosing the axioms. Everything after that rests on solid logic. If a statement does not have a solid proof then that statement cannot be considered to be true. Some people may choose to abandon logic and believe it to be true with no proof, but that's just people being illogical, not some deep statement that truth exists without proof.
That's simply false. The system doesn't do anything of the source. When a user provides the system with a theorem, he also provides a proof. So the system only needs to check that proof, and the proof will contain direct references to other theorems that it relies on. There is no need for exhaustive checking or indeed all that many smarts at all.
To repeat: the wiki doesn't prove submitted theorems, it merely checks the correctness of the human-created proofs submitted with the theorems.
I only mentioned it because the guy I replied to mentioned it. Points 1 and 2 were separate.
I do not understand your second paragraph at all. As far as I understand it, this wiki will not be mechanically searching for new, unknown theorems. All it will be doing is mechanically verifying human-created proofs for submitted theorems. For some reason people see machine verification and fly off into nonsense la-la land. But verifying a human-created proof is nothing particularly special. What's interesting about this wiki is only that it aims to build a large-scale repository of theorems and their proofs in a machine-readable language. Nothing about how it works is in any way revolutionary or even all that interesting, only how it's being organized.
I can't tell if you're utterly clueless, or if you're speaking on a level so far above me that I can't even detect the fact that it contains intelligence.
A statement is either true or false given certain axioms. It's not "relative to a structure" or to anything else outside those axioms. If it is "known" then it has a proof, otherwise it isn't really known.
All Godel did was prove that there are true statements which have no proof. This is interesting, in that it means it's impossible to mechanically derive all true statements which come from a set of non-trivial axioms. But essentially by definition, any statement which has no proof is not mathematically "known".
Wikipedia claims that the house's take in poker is 5-10% per hand. That's a guaranteed loss to everyone sitting at the table. You'll not find anything like that in the stock market.
With gambling, you're guaranteed a net loss when examining the gambling population at large. It's possible to beat the trend by being good and playing the right games, but overall, people lose money gambling.
With stocks, you're virtually guaranteed a net gain by following some very simple rules. Don't base your purchases on sudden trends. Diversify. Play long term. Doing this, anyone can get a good return from the stock market. And when you get a return, everyone wins. That's because your money wasn't just going into a betting pool, it was being invested, and the growth in your money comes directly from value being created by the companies you invested in.
In short, in gambling you will lose long-term unless you play things just right, in stocks you will win long-term unless you make an effort not to.
As for the second claim, it was in fact a not so implicit assumption that such a system could be sufficient to prove all known mathematical truths, and in the event that it could not, that another more complete system could. Goedel proved both those claims false.
What does this even mean? How can a mathematical truth be 'known" if it cannot be proven?
What Goedel proved false was that it would be impossible to prove all mathematical truths. But working through what is known and creating mechanically-verifiable proofs for all the ones that are actually true is certainly theoretically possible.
Goedel would be relevant if you were talking about a project to prove every true statement. But we're not, so it's not. I can't understand why anyone would even bring it up.
Machine readability is what separates this from Russell's work. In that, by using a machine-readable proof language, the proofs can be verified mechanically.
Goedel's conclusion is completely irrelevant to this project, so I don't understand why you even discuss it.
Any given mathematical fact falls into one of three categories:
Provably true.
Provably false.
Impossible to prove either way.
All Godel did was prove that category 3 exists. Previously it was thought that all facts fell into either "true" or "false", and the challenge was figuring out which was which.
You seem to be talking about known mathematics which have not been formalized but are considered to be true. This is, from what I can see, a major target of this wiki. Such things are a major source of uncertainty. Absent a formal proof, maybe there's a faulty piece of reasoning behind it that nobody has found yet.
Any mathematical fact which has a correct, known proof can be verified by such a wiki, at least in theory (I don't know if the tools are capable yet). Remember that the wiki is not proving facts, it is merely verifying the proofs put in by humans. If the proof is solid then it can be converted to the software's proof language and verified. If there is no such proof then it really shouldn't be considered to be part of known mathematics, since absent such a proof it's not really known whether the statement is true or not.
For invoking the name "Godel" as if it meant anything in this context when it clearly doesn't, your Slashdot posting license is hereby revoked for a period of one year. The Court also sentences you to read what Godel actually wrote. Furthermore, after your posting license is returned, the Court imposes a probationary period of 3 years during which you will be required to think and apply logic to your posts before you click Submit.
1. Russell did not, as far as I know, write any proofs in machine-readable language. 2. Goedel proved that such an endeavor cannot contain all true statements. But of course they never claimed that it would.
Maybe if you paid more attention you would be less amazed.
Seriously, when was the last time you went out with 7% or more of your assets and lost it all? There is a difference between going out gambling with $100 and losing it all and losing 7% of a large investment.
Nonsensical. The claim was not that gambling with small sums was better than investing with large sums. The claim was that the stock market was worse than gambling, period.
Like someone else pointed out earlier in the thread, at least with gambling you know the odds and you have a chance to tell if there are better players than you at the poker table. With stocks, you never see the CEO who's about to run with the money.
If you didn't see the current crisis coming at least a year ahead then you're just as much of a fool as someone who thinks he can beat the house at blackjack because he "has a system".
In the end, I would still trust a lot of investment opportunities over gambling (poker, never play table games where you play against the house's hand), but perhaps just maybe I can have more fun gambling a very small portion of my income away than doing various other activities that money can buy....and if you're good at reading people, then you have a good chance of coming out with a profit.
Hey, I have no problem with people who gamble small amounts because they find it entertaining. Certainly I spend plenty of money on entertainment. But that's a distant thing from saying that gambling in a casino is "better".
I don't gamble at all. I don't find it enjoyable, I have a hard time understanding how people do. But I accept that they do. I'm sure that everyone on this site has some kind of pastime that they spend fair amounts of money on, unless they're so dirt-poor that they simply can't afford one. Personally I spend a couple hundred bucks a month on flying. Unlike gambling there is absolutely no way that this will ever make money for me. And unlike gambling, there is a fair chance that it will one day kill me. And yet, tell people that I spend a couple hundred bucks a month flying sailplanes and people just think that's interesting, but tell them I blow a couple hundred bucks a month playing poker in a casino and suddenly I'm an idiot who doesn't understand math.
I'd prefer to phrase the last one as "Stupid people think you can get rich at it." As far as I know, most professional poker players don't make astoundingly large amounts of money. Obviously it will vary a lot depending on their skill, where they play, and so forth. But the stupid people who are in there gambling with stars in their eyes aren't there to make a living at it, they're there to hit the jackpot and win big and never have to work again.
It's a fact of life that there is always someone better than you lurking somewhere. The champions of today will be beat by some pimply faced guy from the internet next year. It would seem that the primary skill of successful professional poker players is avoiding one another and finding tables with suckers on them.
That's an astonishing flash of insight you had there. By the way, have you also discovered that the sky is blue and the sun is warm? These are things I have recently realized and they have changed my life.
Of course a poker player who's in it for the money wants to avoid players who are better than he is. Duh.
Your logic on the second paragraph is stunning. Do you use that kind of logic to melt the brains of other players? I think it would work.
Could you please be more specific? I don't see what's wrong with my logic. Yes, clearly people who make a living at poker must be subsidized by people who don't. And since the house takes a cut, there must be more money coming in from the people who don't than going out from the people who do. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to make money from it.
You don't believe that people go to casinos to have fun, knowing that they will come out of it with less money than they went in? Well, believe what you like, but I happen to personally know several people who prove my side and disprove yours.
Casinos can be tremendously entertaining for the right type of personality. Gambling can be fun even if you don't win, there are nice side benefits like drinks and shows, and on a plain hourly basis it can be very cheap when done right. I don't enjoy it myself, but that's hardly going to make me deny that it happens.
What exactly is dishonest about investing in the stock market? I happen to have a surplus of money (and so should you, so that a sudden disaster doesn't wipe you out) and that money does a lot more good both to me and to other people sitting on the stock market than it would hiding under my mattress.
Funny, I never heard about that. Learned something new!
I totally agree about real-world connection speeds. There must be somebody, somewhere, sometime who saw an 56k connection speed. But it sure wasn't me or anyone I ever knew.
I don't understand. You answer your own question. The people who make money at it do guarantee that they play against people who are worse than them (on average), by virtue of becoming and staying good at the game.
Of course an average player can't make money at it. (Unless they have a skill for finding tables filled with really crappy players, anyway.) That's why it's not the average players who do it for a living.
Obviously the people who fall into categories 1 and 3 must put in more money than the people who fall into category 2 take out, but that no more disproves the existence of category 2 than the fact that customers put more money into a store than the workers take out disproves the existence of the workers.
And? Do you think Skype video chat is going to put you anywhere near the limit? Once again, get a clue.
(Hint: based on TV shows I've downloaded, 12 hours of video chat a day at a bandwidth that would just reach the cap would give you 720p HD video with great-quality encoding. Somehow Skype has not quite reached that quality level when I've seen people use it for video chat.)
1) It's fun. When you plunk down $20 for you and your significant other to see a movie in a theater, you have no chance of ever getting that money back. But it's worth it to you for the entertainment. Same goes with gambling. You lose money but a lot of people enjoy it. I don't, personally, but many people do.
2) It's profitable. When playing poker, you don't have to beat the house, you just have to beat the other players. The house takes a portion of the winnings but if you can consistently beat the rest of the table then you come out ahead. It's not like other casino games in this respect. You're not playing against the house, you're just paying the house for the privilege of playing against other people. You can, and many people do, make a living playing poker.
Well, there are actually three types:
3) Idiots think they will win big.
But the point being, with reasons 1 and 2 it's possible to gamble without being irrational or stupid.
That's kind of ridiculous. This latest spill is being touted as the End of the World, and yet the Dow Jones index fell a massive 7%. When was the last time you went to a casino, played all night, and lost only seven percent of your money?
And yes, the longer-term decline has been quite a bit more but it still doesn't come anywhere close to the losses you can easily rack up in mere hours of gambling.
Most places in the US have had unlimited local phone calls for decades. Many phone plans now include unlimited phone calls anywhere in the country. So yes, we do get all-you-can-eat phone calls.
I still agree with your overall point. If you use more, you should pay more. 250GB is a huge cap, far larger than most people appreciate, and will not cause problems for the vast majority of users. The only problem is that people who use more than 250GB/month should be able to pay extra for their usage, not get kicked off.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just plain stupid. Is everyone who drinks beer occasionally because they like it an alcoholic? No. Is everyone who enjoys going to a casino occasionally a gambling addict? No.
I agree, mostly. But with games like poker (are there other ones available in casinos?) where you play against other gamblers and not against the house, it is reasonable to play for money.
The gambler's axiom is "the house always wins", and this is why you shouldn't be there to make money with most games. Most casino games, the house's win is your loss. But it's not so with poker. With poker, the house always wins because it takes a percentage of each pot. But you can still win even while the house is winning. If you're a consistently good poker player you can very reasonably come in and make money at it. The same is not true of other casino games like slots, blackjack, or whatever else. With those, the odds are always tilted against you no matter what you do (unless you count cards or otherwise cheat). But in poker, the odds depend on how your skill compares to the other players.
But of course you're right about all the other games. And if you don't possess good poker skills then your idea holds true for that as well.
Disclaimer: I don't play poker, I've only read about it a bit, and I don't gamble.
I suspect that it is because our 'minds' include something more than just material--something akin to a soul. We can see on a 'meta' level that mere machines cannot.
I'm sorry, but I view this on the same level as I view people who believe that dancing in a certain fashion will make it rain.
Something is known to be true if there is proof for it. The only place where "soul" enters into things is in choosing the axioms. Everything after that rests on solid logic. If a statement does not have a solid proof then that statement cannot be considered to be true. Some people may choose to abandon logic and believe it to be true with no proof, but that's just people being illogical, not some deep statement that truth exists without proof.
That's simply false. The system doesn't do anything of the source. When a user provides the system with a theorem, he also provides a proof. So the system only needs to check that proof, and the proof will contain direct references to other theorems that it relies on. There is no need for exhaustive checking or indeed all that many smarts at all.
To repeat: the wiki doesn't prove submitted theorems, it merely checks the correctness of the human-created proofs submitted with the theorems.
I only mentioned it because the guy I replied to mentioned it. Points 1 and 2 were separate.
I do not understand your second paragraph at all. As far as I understand it, this wiki will not be mechanically searching for new, unknown theorems. All it will be doing is mechanically verifying human-created proofs for submitted theorems. For some reason people see machine verification and fly off into nonsense la-la land. But verifying a human-created proof is nothing particularly special. What's interesting about this wiki is only that it aims to build a large-scale repository of theorems and their proofs in a machine-readable language. Nothing about how it works is in any way revolutionary or even all that interesting, only how it's being organized.
I can't tell if you're utterly clueless, or if you're speaking on a level so far above me that I can't even detect the fact that it contains intelligence.
A statement is either true or false given certain axioms. It's not "relative to a structure" or to anything else outside those axioms. If it is "known" then it has a proof, otherwise it isn't really known.
All Godel did was prove that there are true statements which have no proof. This is interesting, in that it means it's impossible to mechanically derive all true statements which come from a set of non-trivial axioms. But essentially by definition, any statement which has no proof is not mathematically "known".
Wikipedia claims that the house's take in poker is 5-10% per hand. That's a guaranteed loss to everyone sitting at the table. You'll not find anything like that in the stock market.
With gambling, you're guaranteed a net loss when examining the gambling population at large. It's possible to beat the trend by being good and playing the right games, but overall, people lose money gambling.
With stocks, you're virtually guaranteed a net gain by following some very simple rules. Don't base your purchases on sudden trends. Diversify. Play long term. Doing this, anyone can get a good return from the stock market. And when you get a return, everyone wins. That's because your money wasn't just going into a betting pool, it was being invested, and the growth in your money comes directly from value being created by the companies you invested in.
In short, in gambling you will lose long-term unless you play things just right, in stocks you will win long-term unless you make an effort not to.
So what is it that makes gambling better?
As for the second claim, it was in fact a not so implicit assumption that such a system could be sufficient to prove all known mathematical truths, and in the event that it could not, that another more complete system could. Goedel proved both those claims false.
What does this even mean? How can a mathematical truth be 'known" if it cannot be proven?
What Goedel proved false was that it would be impossible to prove all mathematical truths. But working through what is known and creating mechanically-verifiable proofs for all the ones that are actually true is certainly theoretically possible.
Goedel would be relevant if you were talking about a project to prove every true statement. But we're not, so it's not. I can't understand why anyone would even bring it up.
Machine readability is what separates this from Russell's work. In that, by using a machine-readable proof language, the proofs can be verified mechanically.
Goedel's conclusion is completely irrelevant to this project, so I don't understand why you even discuss it.
Any given mathematical fact falls into one of three categories:
All Godel did was prove that category 3 exists. Previously it was thought that all facts fell into either "true" or "false", and the challenge was figuring out which was which.
You seem to be talking about known mathematics which have not been formalized but are considered to be true. This is, from what I can see, a major target of this wiki. Such things are a major source of uncertainty. Absent a formal proof, maybe there's a faulty piece of reasoning behind it that nobody has found yet.
Any mathematical fact which has a correct, known proof can be verified by such a wiki, at least in theory (I don't know if the tools are capable yet). Remember that the wiki is not proving facts, it is merely verifying the proofs put in by humans. If the proof is solid then it can be converted to the software's proof language and verified. If there is no such proof then it really shouldn't be considered to be part of known mathematics, since absent such a proof it's not really known whether the statement is true or not.
Silicon Jedi,
For invoking the name "Godel" as if it meant anything in this context when it clearly doesn't, your Slashdot posting license is hereby revoked for a period of one year. The Court also sentences you to read what Godel actually wrote. Furthermore, after your posting license is returned, the Court imposes a probationary period of 3 years during which you will be required to think and apply logic to your posts before you click Submit.
Next case!
1. Russell did not, as far as I know, write any proofs in machine-readable language.
2. Goedel proved that such an endeavor cannot contain all true statements. But of course they never claimed that it would.
Maybe if you paid more attention you would be less amazed.
Seriously, when was the last time you went out with 7% or more of your assets and lost it all? There is a difference between going out gambling with $100 and losing it all and losing 7% of a large investment.
Nonsensical. The claim was not that gambling with small sums was better than investing with large sums. The claim was that the stock market was worse than gambling, period.
Like someone else pointed out earlier in the thread, at least with gambling you know the odds and you have a chance to tell if there are better players than you at the poker table. With stocks, you never see the CEO who's about to run with the money.
If you didn't see the current crisis coming at least a year ahead then you're just as much of a fool as someone who thinks he can beat the house at blackjack because he "has a system".
In the end, I would still trust a lot of investment opportunities over gambling (poker, never play table games where you play against the house's hand), but perhaps just maybe I can have more fun gambling a very small portion of my income away than doing various other activities that money can buy. ...and if you're good at reading people, then you have a good chance of coming out with a profit.
Hey, I have no problem with people who gamble small amounts because they find it entertaining. Certainly I spend plenty of money on entertainment. But that's a distant thing from saying that gambling in a casino is "better".
I don't gamble at all. I don't find it enjoyable, I have a hard time understanding how people do. But I accept that they do. I'm sure that everyone on this site has some kind of pastime that they spend fair amounts of money on, unless they're so dirt-poor that they simply can't afford one. Personally I spend a couple hundred bucks a month on flying. Unlike gambling there is absolutely no way that this will ever make money for me. And unlike gambling, there is a fair chance that it will one day kill me. And yet, tell people that I spend a couple hundred bucks a month flying sailplanes and people just think that's interesting, but tell them I blow a couple hundred bucks a month playing poker in a casino and suddenly I'm an idiot who doesn't understand math.
I'd prefer to phrase the last one as "Stupid people think you can get rich at it." As far as I know, most professional poker players don't make astoundingly large amounts of money. Obviously it will vary a lot depending on their skill, where they play, and so forth. But the stupid people who are in there gambling with stars in their eyes aren't there to make a living at it, they're there to hit the jackpot and win big and never have to work again.
It's a fact of life that there is always someone better than you lurking somewhere. The champions of today will be beat by some pimply faced guy from the internet next year. It would seem that the primary skill of successful professional poker players is avoiding one another and finding tables with suckers on them.
That's an astonishing flash of insight you had there. By the way, have you also discovered that the sky is blue and the sun is warm? These are things I have recently realized and they have changed my life.
Of course a poker player who's in it for the money wants to avoid players who are better than he is. Duh.
Your logic on the second paragraph is stunning. Do you use that kind of logic to melt the brains of other players? I think it would work.
Could you please be more specific? I don't see what's wrong with my logic. Yes, clearly people who make a living at poker must be subsidized by people who don't. And since the house takes a cut, there must be more money coming in from the people who don't than going out from the people who do. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to make money from it.
You don't believe that people go to casinos to have fun, knowing that they will come out of it with less money than they went in? Well, believe what you like, but I happen to personally know several people who prove my side and disprove yours.
Casinos can be tremendously entertaining for the right type of personality. Gambling can be fun even if you don't win, there are nice side benefits like drinks and shows, and on a plain hourly basis it can be very cheap when done right. I don't enjoy it myself, but that's hardly going to make me deny that it happens.
What exactly is dishonest about investing in the stock market? I happen to have a surplus of money (and so should you, so that a sudden disaster doesn't wipe you out) and that money does a lot more good both to me and to other people sitting on the stock market than it would hiding under my mattress.
Funny, I never heard about that. Learned something new!
I totally agree about real-world connection speeds. There must be somebody, somewhere, sometime who saw an 56k connection speed. But it sure wasn't me or anyone I ever knew.
I don't understand. You answer your own question. The people who make money at it do guarantee that they play against people who are worse than them (on average), by virtue of becoming and staying good at the game.
Of course an average player can't make money at it. (Unless they have a skill for finding tables filled with really crappy players, anyway.) That's why it's not the average players who do it for a living.
Obviously the people who fall into categories 1 and 3 must put in more money than the people who fall into category 2 take out, but that no more disproves the existence of category 2 than the fact that customers put more money into a store than the workers take out disproves the existence of the workers.
And? Do you think Skype video chat is going to put you anywhere near the limit? Once again, get a clue.
(Hint: based on TV shows I've downloaded, 12 hours of video chat a day at a bandwidth that would just reach the cap would give you 720p HD video with great-quality encoding. Somehow Skype has not quite reached that quality level when I've seen people use it for video chat.)
People do it for two reasons.
1) It's fun. When you plunk down $20 for you and your significant other to see a movie in a theater, you have no chance of ever getting that money back. But it's worth it to you for the entertainment. Same goes with gambling. You lose money but a lot of people enjoy it. I don't, personally, but many people do.
2) It's profitable. When playing poker, you don't have to beat the house, you just have to beat the other players. The house takes a portion of the winnings but if you can consistently beat the rest of the table then you come out ahead. It's not like other casino games in this respect. You're not playing against the house, you're just paying the house for the privilege of playing against other people. You can, and many people do, make a living playing poker.
Well, there are actually three types:
3) Idiots think they will win big.
But the point being, with reasons 1 and 2 it's possible to gamble without being irrational or stupid.
That's kind of ridiculous. This latest spill is being touted as the End of the World, and yet the Dow Jones index fell a massive 7%. When was the last time you went to a casino, played all night, and lost only seven percent of your money?
And yes, the longer-term decline has been quite a bit more but it still doesn't come anywhere close to the losses you can easily rack up in mere hours of gambling.
Unlimited water?
Yes.
Unlimited gas?
Yes, assuming you mean the kind that comes into my house as an actual gas. (Not the liquid "gas" that goes in my vehicle.)
Unlimited cell phone calls?
No, but I could if I paid a bit more.
I agree with your overall point, but those were kind of bad examples.
Most places in the US have had unlimited local phone calls for decades. Many phone plans now include unlimited phone calls anywhere in the country. So yes, we do get all-you-can-eat phone calls.
I still agree with your overall point. If you use more, you should pay more. 250GB is a huge cap, far larger than most people appreciate, and will not cause problems for the vast majority of users. The only problem is that people who use more than 250GB/month should be able to pay extra for their usage, not get kicked off.