Hey guys,

Ok, so, I enjoy poker writing and talking and blogging and video-making. But there's a few problems. First, to make an excellent instructional video, I think I would need to spend at least 4 hours preparing for every 1 hour of content. I feel guilty about putting out sub-par videos- and increasingly in my videos I've had to either be vague or terse in order not to give away too much, which I've decided is worse than making no videos at all. In any case, if I make a video, that is all time I could be using to study poker on my own, or to play poker for lots of money where I have a large edge. Second, the more excellent my video, the more I make my opponents play better, both in general and against me personally. So, that makes video-making both pure $/hour EV bad, and also future EV bad. I can't possibly put an exact number on how much money (including opportunity cost) I think I lose making a video, but I'd guess it's something like 20k for a mediocre vid, and upwards of 50k for a good one. And let me tell you, Leggo ain't paying me that kind of money.

Right but so I'd still like to do something for the community occasionally. I think a good compromise might be to make a more fun video, but one which has interesting strategic content. Specifically, I'm inspired by the professional video gaming community's practice of 'live-streaming' (where you watch a pro play in real time) and of DayNine's video series 'Funday Monday' (where people submit videos of themselves playing the game with special rules- e.g. only using one type of unit, or not using a certain resource etc). So, I'll make a video for Leggo on the condition that it's fun and kind of goofy. This gets me off the hook on both the integrity side (since the video is for fun, the strategic content doesn't have to be my absolute best effort), and gets me off the hook on the EV side (if my opponents see my thought process for playing a 100% VPIP, this isn't exactly the end of the world). I also think that if you guys watch closely and read between the lines a little, you will learn a lot of important stuff about strategy- but I like the idea of keeping the strategy component a bit subtle and lighthearted.

So, if this is a good idea, please post in the comments section, and maybe Aaron will allow me to make it so. I have a few ideas for the video(s) which I'll post here, but if you think of something awesome just leave a post in the comments section and I'll do that instead.

Some ideas:

HU nlhe with no folding preflop
HU anything with showing my cards to my opponent every hand
HU or 6max with no call button
HU or 6max with only overbetting
6max where I can only VPIP for a limp or for a call
Only donk bet or checkraise OOP
No cbetting

Or some combination thereof.

I'd like to pick something where I have some decent chance of booking a win, or better yet a decent chance of beating the game. I think all of these qualify in the very short term if my opponents don't expect it, and if I have a decent sized skill edge on my opponents.

Ben

Today while biking over to play squash I got to musing about the meanings of the ubiquitous poker terms "TAG" and "LAG" which we use to rapidly describe players. I think the terms are pretty much anti-helpful; that is, they DO tell us something about a player, but what they tell us is probably worse than nothing at all. I actually like the descriptions though- we need some kind of snappy term to describe a player qualitatively- and TAG and LAG are handy acronyms. And so I don't think they need be thrown out completely but instead just repurposed a bit.

So rather than assume everyone has the same usage of these terms (which I suspect they don't) I'll just establish one to start off with. I *think* TAG and LAG were probably coined before I played poker, but as I was learning poker they were being repurposed to loosely correspond to certain ranges of preflop stats. As I first used the terms, a TAG was around 18 VPIP/ 15 PFR / 5 3bet to 24 VPIP / 19 PFR / 7 3bet, and LAG occupied a higher end somewhere before maniac. Nit was anyone less than an 18 VPIP. Keep in mind this is all 6max, and these criteria seem a bit on the tight side now. I suppose they have since been adjusted, although now we often substitute HUD stats for the TAG or LAG description for greater precision, making the terms less frequent on the forums.

The confusion crept in, both historically and currently, because people seemed to think that a preflop description either entailed or strongly suggested a corresponding postflop strategy. So, for example, the TAG player was supposed to play his TAG game preflop and then follow up with aggressive flop play to exploit his tight image (hence tight-aggressive with the aggro part supposedly corresponding to postflop). Similarly the LAG was the guy who wouldn't put on the brakes postflop. This assimilation of preflop and postflop play did a huge amount of harm to the poker community as a whole, and led to an untold amount of mistakes both in hand criticism on forums and in actual play- because of course preflop stats entail absolutely nothing about postflop play aside from the range of hands which the player has to work with after he sees the flop. Even stranger, if the 'T' in 'TAG' was to indicate the preflop strategy, and the 'AG' was to indicate the postflop strategy, then apparently the community ran out of acronyms, because almost never on the forums would a poster admit to playing the dreaded 'LAP' or 'Tight Passive,' and so in almost all cases the postflop types got lumped together and the discussion was dominated by preflop play.

I wonder if this rigid terminology helped some fundamentally unsound, and to be honest not all that tricky styles win a lot of money during the heyday of TAG and LAG's usage. A few players come to mind especially- Punketty, ADZ, on the "LAG" side, and SamH and EmpireMaker on the "TAG" side (there are players still exploiting this preflop-postflop blindness people have, but I won't mention currently active ones). The first two players were really playing loose passive- opening a ton of pots and then waiting for the nuts to put money in. The second two did indeed play tight preflop- but they played just as tight postflop, waiting for the nuts to get money in. Against the former, winning was as easy as 3betting a bunch pre and then folding to raises post, and against the latter, winning was as easy as playing reasonable hands pre and then betting when checked to.

The insensitivity to hybrid styles is why I find the terms worse than useless, because just about everyone is some sort of hybrid style! They fail to capture all of the gradations in preflop and postflop play, and miss all of the subtle differences which are critically important. Instead, people just use some "standard" set of reads with TAG and some other set with LAG, not realizing that the standard reads they employ do more harm than good.

So I found it interesting that from a game theory perspective, TAG and LAG can actually come to have an interesting and useful meaning. So, if tight is read as a deviation from optimal play on the side of being too tight with some action(s), and aggressive is read as a deviation from optimal play on the side of being too aggressive with some action(s), then TAG gets a new meaning. If I elect to play too few hands preflop, then my optimal aggression frequency postflop will increase (relative to postflop aggression frequency for an optimal preflop range) provided I'm playing an optimal opponent. So, if the 'AG' is to have meaning as an exploitative strategy, then I have to elect to play exploitably aggressive postflop even given the fact that my handrange is stronger than it should be. So, TAG means to play an exploitative strategy such that I elect to exploit my opponents by playing too tight pre, and then decide to exploit them in the exact opposite way by playing too aggro post. Weird! LAG can be analyzed the same way. I decide to play suboptimally aggro both pre and postflop to exploit my opponents.

Even this more precise way of using TAG and LAG doesn't help much. First, these are kind of weird strategies to play- where once we used to use TAG or LAG to describe pretty much everybody, now TAG and LAG just describe some kind of wacky of strategies to be employed in rare circumstances. Second, the breaking up of reads into preflop and postflop is pretty imprecise- it's fairly common for a player to be aggressive on a given street, texture, or vs a certain line, but not to be aggressive postflop as a whole.

So I suppose the way that I find TAG and LAG interesting these days is to describe the psychology of certain player types. Take for example how Ivey plays on TV cash games. If Ivey had to write down his strategy on a piece of paper, or play it online, he would probably be something like 65/30/8 playing 9 handed. In effect then, he's offering a challenge, saying "I'm gonna play so bad preflop that any .50/1$ grinder should be able to crush me. But I'm going to play so much better than you later that I'll make up for it." The attitude of playing bad and knowing it, but doing so calculatedly as bait for your opponents to me is the psychology of a LAG player. The psychology of a TAG is more like that of, say, Dan Harrington, where he's saying "I'm going to play too tight, and I know that you know that I'm playing too tight. But there is going to be some really big pot later where I have nothing, and theoretically shouldn't bluff, but I'm going to bluff anyways because I think you'll fold too big hands to me." So the TAG is the psychology of betting and raising too little in small pots in order to be bluff too much in huge pots, and to make those huge pot bluffs +EV enough to make up for all the folding. To me at least, these represent two fairly common types of players, and using the words to point at attitudes rather than stats makes them useful qualitatively, instead of being shorthand for something quantitative, and misleading shorthand at that.

Me? I just play solid.

Hi guys,

I'm just linking here to a thread I posted on 2p2 in the general marketplace looking for a PA. I've gotten a few pms so far but not as many I would like. I realize it might be a bit weird to post this kind of request on a blog, but since not many people read the marketplace, I'm hoping someone who would be interested might read this instead.

Here's the thread: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...-area-1188045/

Ben

ps: I'll be out of town for a few days spending Easter weekend with family, so don't expect me to respond to pms until early next week.

Hey all.

Consider this blog as practice for my poker book (in the somewhat unlikely event I decide to write it). The format is going to be "Hands with Sauce", borrowed wholesale from the classic bridge book "Bridge with Reese" written by the renowned bridge pro Terrance. The idea is that I take the reader through my thought process, such as it is, in intriguing hands, stopping along the way to touch on various theoretical topics of interest and then, upon further reflection, dissect the plays which result. Without further ado then,

Hands with Sauce #1: 6bet shit-flinging vs AARookie

Stakes: 40/80nl 6-Max. Game was 5-handed
Hero (SB): $33,739.5
(BB): $42,479
UTG: $19,498
CO: $47,508
BTN: $16,000
Pre-flop: 9c6c dealt to Hero (SB) ... UTG folds. MP folds. BTN raises to $178. I 3-bets to $720. Villain 4-bets to $1920. I 5-bet to $5127. Villain 6-bets to $9055. I called.
Flop ($18,288): 8s 2s As … I checked. Villain bets $6650. I called.
Turn ($31,588): Qc … Check check.
River ($31,588): 4c … I shoved. He called with 4d6d.

This hand seems to be fairly infamous across the internetz, and I still get pms asking about it fairly regularly. In the past I've given some one or two sentence answers which seemed to satisfy basically nobody, so here I'll try to do you guys a bit better and go through things piece by piece.

First, in order to get into character for this hand, you have to understand just how insanely aggro AARookie was playing during this session and previous sessions. As far as opening pots and 3betting, Rookie was unspectacular, playing maybe 15% 3b vs steal and then something like 40% steal himself. However, it seems as if Rookie felt he had found the holy grail in the positional 4bet, as I have never seen a sober person 4ball as much as AArookie did during the 20k hands of 40/80 he played in the couple months surrounding this hand. My HUD had him 4betting something in excess of 40%, and while I don't have a stat explicitly counting cold 4bets versus 4bets after opening, it was unmistakeable that his cold 4betting frequency was even more off-kilter than his 4bet after steal frequency. In order to combat this, of course, me and everyone else with half a brain at the table had tightened up our 3betting ranges significantly whenever AARookie had position (even if he was halfway across the table) and yet he was undeterred, and continued to 4bet seemingly everytime he hadn't checked the auto-fold button.

Judging from the opening size of $178 (although I don't remember explicitly), I'm guessing that the opener in this hand was Takechip, aka FLIPokerHer on Full Tilt Poker. At this time, Takechip was playing a curious strategy of opening nearly 100% of buttons, and then folding over 75% of the time to 3bets. He also seemed strangely unresponsive to punishment, so I was laying it on pretty thick and playing a strategy of 30% or so 3bet from the small blind, depending of course on the predilections of the particular bb. In this case I held 9c6c and so I was torn- on the one hand Takechip had offered me 2.2 bbs, but on the other AARookie was lurking behind me. Taking the hand from Takechip's perspective, I decided that he was likely to be especially loose from the button in this exact situation as Rookie was nitty versus steal in the bb, playing something like 40% of hands vs a minraise. Takechip was the type to pick up on this, but he wasn't the type to realize I would pick up on him picking up on this, so I decided to throw in $720 and see what happened.

Unfortunately, Rookie woke up behind me and made it his customary $1920. At this point you could argue that I got overly stubborn; there are certainly more ideal hands to 5bet bluff with than 9c6c. Previous to this action I had made three 3bets at the table, and on all 3 of them Rookie 4bet me, and finding myself with nothing I elected to fold. I believe 2 of 3 were cold 4bets, and I had witnessed a few other cold 4bets made by Rookie. Appraising Rookie's range in light of today's play and his overally splashiness I was confident it contained plenty of fluff and I could justify 5betting. To put a number on it, I guessed he was 4betting this spot with between 12% and 35% of hands. Quantifying my own strategy, my Rookie-avoidance plan was to go ahead and 3bet a fairly polarized 10-14% vs steal. As a rule of thumb, when the guy who puts in the 4th bet has a wider range than the guy putting in the 3rd bet, either the 3bettor plays awful or the 4bettor is putting too much money in too often. So, I knew I would be 5betting a frequently with my range in this spot for high profit, but not having tested Rookie's expansive range yet with one of my bluffs, I decided the time was going to be now since if he gave me credit he could be folding as much as 85% of his range. I made it $5127.

After a bit of thought, Rookie made it $9055. At this point your guess is as good as mine as to his range. I have my particular way of strategy-reading, and one thing I am uncomfortable doing is making intuitive leaps with regard to a range I have never encountered before, and I had never encountered a Rookie 6bet before, certaintly not one with over 300bb stacks. Interestingly, many people who I have talked to about this hand thought Rookie's 6bet was obviously a bluff, but I have to admit that I don't think I could ever make that read, or would want to. But taking his incredibly wide 4betting range as an assumption, I could envision various ways in which he might decide to play, and which were consistent with his overall approach. So I ruled out a strategy where he would fold everything but QQ+ AQs+ to 5bet; he was probably an aware enough player to realize an opponent like me would be coming for him with bluffs at least occasionally and that if he didn't play back his strategy would be easily exploitable. This statement is not in contradiction with my previous paragraph where I conjectured he might fold 85% (all his non premiums), as once I saw the min 6bet against my first 5bet, the Bayesian probability of him playing fit or fold against 5bet goes down a little bit, and perhaps even more than the bare probability sugggests since it was the very first time I had ever 5bet and Rookie might be tempted to draw a line in the sand now in order to continue his putative exploitation of me in the future. I decided to attribute to him a strategy of playing back with between 20% and 80% of his bluffs (quite the wide confidence interval!), roughly 15% of his ATs-AJs, 99-JJ, AQo combos, and then roughly 80% of his QQ+ AQs+ combos. However, since his postflop strategy was also weak, and since occasionally Rookie's strategy might be very tight for 6betting, and since I held a hand with poor equity all in preflop without blockers, I decided not to jam. This was probably not the right choice incidentally, since I risk $28,612 to win $14360 if I jam preflop, and if I have 27% vs a calling range, I must succeed at least 58%. Taking a weighted average of my assumptions, he should fold at least 58%, making a jam +ev. Still, a call may very well be even better. Getting $3928 to $14360, or 3.65 to 1, and being only a 2.57 to 1 dog against a nightmare scenario of TT+ AK+, I felt I couldn't fold, needing to realize only around 2/3 of...

Check out 0-2:00 for Rand Paul's speech, the rest of it isn't really worth watching. I suspect that the 'seven days of food' criterion is probably a bit hyperbolic, but the bottom line is that we are giving our government the power to suspend the liberties of persons suspected of a crime, whether US citizens or not. A good measure of the freedom of a country is how it treats its dissident members, and therefore US is well on its way towards being much less free.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK0pEFSX7Ns

In not particular order:

Truth doesn't matter:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/op...=1&ref=opinion

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/201...and-elections/

Morals Are Relative:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...ni-on-torture/

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/04/geor...ans/singleton/

We Are Legislating The Police State

http://articles.businessinsider.com/...military-junta

Look, you can hear one of our elected representatives calmly say it on live:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/appearance/600840428

(@ 7:19)

I'm going to refrain from analysis in this blog right now- the views of the people I linked more or less reflect my own. I put all of these recent developments together in order to show that things which I take for granted living in an Open Society- ie that there is such a thing as Truth, that we can rationally deliberate, that morals are not relative, that the government is not able to forcibly detain it's own citizens without trial- are all being eroded rather quickly, and that no one seems to care.

First- there's a famous article by Peter Singer from which most of the arguments in this blog are directly taken or at the very least inspired by. See it here: http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1979----.htm

Peter Singer is a utilitarian. Very broadly speaking, this means that 'the fundamental moral principle is to take actions which maximize general happiness.' What I want to distinguish from the outset here, though, is that whether you are a utilitarian in general or Singer's particular version, or anything else, one of the main arguments in Equality for Animals still holds for you.

That was to get your attention. I mean something a bit more precise. First, if you choose to accept Singer's utilitarianism, then it's abundantly clear that you are committed to not eating meat, at least of "sentient" creatures. Sentience means something like 'the ability to feel pain or pleasure' and presupposes some type of central nervous system with which feeling gets done. Sentient: cows, pigs, goats, chickens, probably some fish. Not sentient: rocks, potatoes, kale etc. Probably not sentient: clams, mussels, bees etc. It should also be noted here, that not all sentient things get "counted" equally here; it's worse to harm a cow than a chicken in virtue of the fact that the cow has a more developed nervous system/emotional apparatus. Singer also makes a strong case that if you call yourself a utilitarian of any flavour, then you are going to be committed to considering the interests of (sentient) animals in some fashion (which might be slightly different from his own).

I don't care (for the purposes of this blog) about any of Singer's arguments which suppose any form of utilitarianism as premise. What I am concerned with is a more modest argument from Equality for Animals which I'll call here the Argument from Marginal Cases (AMC).

The AMC is an example of a type of argument I'm calling (and this might be standard, I'm not sure) an argument from consistency. Arguments from consistency take as premises beliefs we already hold and derive from them a contradiction. If we are rational people, we are faced with a dilemma: either one belief or the other leading to the contradiction must go (after all, we can't say we believe 'X and not X'). I think I like arguments from consistency because of my empiricism (their premises are taken from a description of our actual beliefs). They also tend to be straightforward to argue, without a lot of logical filigree.

Preamble aside, here's the Argument from Marginal Cases (AMC):

First premise: Making moral judgments on the basis of purely physical properties is unjustified and constitutes a moral wrong. By 'purely physical properties' I am trying to string together some words to gather up all of the "isms" - racism, sexism, etc which we think are wrong. For an example of an unjustified judgment 'Only white males should be able to vote.' Being white and male does not endow one with any praise or blameworthy features (note: you should separate physical characteristics like 'whiteness', 'maleness' from cultural characteristics in order to make this clear) in of itself - for instance white males do not have larger and more sophisticated brains or some special talent at voting well on the basis of their whiteness or maleness. As a corollary to this, we may sometimes assign praise or blame on the basis of other properties (for instance, mental development, intelligence etc). To use the voting example again, we might say that only people who can pass a test on citizenship should be able to vote. Note though, that this corollary is not necessary for the argument, I'm just adding it to round things out a bit!

Second Premise: It's wrong to torture, kill, or eat a mentally disabled human or a human infant.

Third Premise: Eating meat is morally permissible in the ways we currently consume meat: for example buying ground beef in the supermarket for dinner.

Argument: Many of the animals we habitually eat (pigs, cows) have equivalent mental capacities to severely disabled humans and infants/young toddlers. I want to make it clear that this is just a fact- if you want to disagree here go read the relevant science. If we accept premise two, we think it's wrong to do things like factory farm mentally challenged humans for our gustatory pleasure. But if we accept premise three, we think it's totally OK to factory farm things like cows for our gustatory pleasure. But if cows have the same relevant mental capacities as the marginal humans we don't factory farm, then the property with which we decide what to factory farm and what not to factory farm seems to be the property that cows look like cows, and mentally challenged humans look like humans. 'Looking like Cow-ness' and 'Looking like human-ness' are clearly purely physical properties. But if we accept premise one, purely physical properties are not acceptable for making moral judgments (and what/what not to kill for our gustatory pleasure certainly constitutes a moral judgement!).

Conclusion: So by P1, either it's acceptable to grow and eat marginal humans and all animals, or it's acceptable to grow and eat neither. But we hold P2 and P3, which says that it is acceptable to grow/eat all animals but not all marginal humans. Therefore, holding P1, P2 and P3 results in contradiction.

So here's the difficulty. We can resolve our contradiction by giving up P1 P2 or P3, or we can resolve the contradiction by finding a flaw in the argument. Which premise is it easiest for people to give up and remain rational/consistent? Where is the flaw in the argument?

Theory:

Anytime you face a decision, you should be putting your opponent on your best range possible, and from that range determining the best action for your range. If you see showdown, and the hand your opponent flips over was not in the range that you made to model the final decision point of the hand, then you should be results oriented. Otherwise you shouldn't be.

Q: What's wrong with this advice?
Q: What's (too) vague about this advice?

Link Day:

1) Very cool article- http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n16/stefan-...ns-to-mckinsey
If nothing else read the first two paragraphs, "As with changes in the use of language generally, readers and listeners become inured to what were once jarring neologisms or solecisms, while phrases that were once so common as to escape notice become in time unusable."

Seriously, it's a very stylish article.

2) Said article is linked from a very cool blog, my favorite sub-section of which is entitled "authoritarianism and fascism alerts". There's a lot to be alerted to.

3) A great word used in said article: 'sottisier'- A collection of ridiculous remarks or stupidities; a collection of howlers.

Used in a sentence: "Beyond the warped ingenuity of these Heath Robinson schemes to force ‘free’ competition to happen in closely controlled circumstances, such interest as the White Paper possesses may lie chiefly in its providing a handy compendium of current officialese, a sottisier of econobabble." (Italics mine own)

I do enjoy a good academic burn, I must say.

Against my better judgement, I've started reading the newspaper again. On the one hand, it is sort of interesting to know what is happening in the world on a day to day basis, but on the other hand, what is happening in the world on a day to day basis tends to be depressing. I also tend to get totally enraged upon reading about current events when I see bad logic and poor arguments being paraded around as sound reasons for making important decisions. Here's one of them-

Recently, in New York City, a large group of mostly young people have started a protest called 'Occupy Wall Street' which has received a lot of coverage. In the photo I saw, people dressed up like zombies shove money in their orifices- which I take to mean they think that Wall Streeters are souless and only love money. Criticisms of the protest have focused on the fact that the protesters are not taking any cohesive strategy of civil disobedience, have not articulate any goals for policy change, and are just generally showing dissastisfaction with Wall Street but not presenting any constructive alternative. (It's totally possible I messed up some of this description, but this is the sense I get from the papers)

This protest exemplifies to me what I think is a popular and wrong position right now among (very loosely) average Americans. They seem to think a few things: 1) Wall Street was responsible for the Financial Crash, 2) Wall Street is bad and should be abolished/changed/heavily regulated/at least some smart person should figure out a way so that those moneygrubbing Wall Streeters cannot create another crisis, 3) Investing is good or at least permissable.

It's my contention that 1 is wrong, or at least simplistic enough that it lacks any real explanatory punch (although I could be wrong about this, I'm certainly not an expert), that 2 might be right or wrong and that 3 might be right or wrong. The key point here is that both 2 and 3 cannot both be true at once and therefore the intuitions/opinions of average enraged Americans involve contradiction.

To simplify matters, I'll take a simpler position which assumes 1 is true. P: Institutional investing should be abolished (Wall Street) and personal investing should be permissable. P isn't a reasonable position however, in that the vast majority of personal investing is mediated by institutions - eg pension funds, mutual funds etc. So then we have to say something like P*: The bad institutions should be regulated/made illegal. However, that doesn't quite work either. In the case of the crash of 2008, many, many "good" institutions bought credit default swaps and the like. They just happened to be horribly wrong about the value of said swaps, and ended up losing their shirts. That leaves then P**: a bad institution is one that is able to profit off of complex and volatile financial derivatives (and the like). And we should illegalize/regulate those! But P** is pretty clearly tantamount to saying that "If someone is smarter than me and beats me in a game of skill for money, I/we are justified in banning them from the playing field." To draw a common analogy, it's as if all the fish in the poker world woke up one morning and said: "Hey guys, poker is pretty friggin' complicated. These poker pros have access to forums and databases and tracking software and HUDS and quantitative software and devote tons of time to the game and are just generally smarter than us fish. That means we can't win! So we should ban pros from playing poker." There are two problems with this view or any view of this kind, 1) It's unjust and 2) It leads to a regress, as if the winners in a game are banned, then as winners are banned some set of losers will become winners who will in turn be the target of the same winner-banning policy and so on ...

However, I did draw the distinction at the top of the previous paragraph (that between solo and institutional investors) in order to show a possible non-contradictory way in which both 2 and 3 can be true. This is Q Institutional investing should be banned (or regulated) in all cases and non institutional investing (this can obviously be definied in various ways: eg exactly one person, set of persons < N, set of capital < N, etc) should remain legal/regulated as is. But I don't think Q is what most people are thinking of when they set out to Occupy Wall Street. I think they want their mutual funds/pension plans/various investments to deliver consistent and positive returns outperforming treasuries/interest rates and they also want it to be impossible for smart people to make a fortune in the markets. They can't fairly have both.

I'll trot out one more pretty speculative account of what might be the motivation for the inconsistent "common sense" view argued against above. It seems to me that people have a mistaken view of what investing is, and that this mistaken view leads to bad intuitions about policy. I think that when people hear "investing" they think of a practice which is guaranteed to have positive returns in the long run, subject to some short term fluctuations up and down. (a funny consequence of this view might be that people holding it have the intuition that shorting something is somehow morally reprehensible.) A possible reason they might think this is that over the past 60 years, which coincides with just about everyone currently investing's lifetimes, the American stock market has had extremely positive returns fairly consistently. However, there is absolutely no reason why this trend has to necessarily continue- past trends do not determine the future: this is the problem of induction. I think people think that Wall Street has somehow "rigged the game" and deprived their investments of the positive returns which are their just due. But an investment (in a stock, for example, not going to talk about derivatives) is just that, owning a very small part of a company. If the company does well, the investment likely produces positive returns, if the company does poorly (for whatever reason) the investment is likely to produce negative returns. Poker players know how to define that situation with a better term than "investment", we prefer to call it a bet.

Btw, this is all stream of consciousness, so not going to edit for content or grammar, there are likely to be errors. Let me know if you like this style of blog!