The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova

Maria Konnikova graduated from Harvard and has a PhD in psychology from Columbia.  Her interest in psychology leads her to study poker. She teams with Eric Seidel, among the most famous and successful poker players ever, to study the game.  Her purpose is not only to learn how to play but also to understand the interaction of chance and skill and how our thought processes affect us.  She also discovers how to make better decisions and the importance of knowing what you can control.

Here are my takeaways:

• People often overestimate their skills relative to luck.  They think they have more control than they do.  Instead, people suffer the illusion of control.  Their perception is flawed.  Making it worse, they ignore facts or information that would alter their decisions if they didn’t rely too heavily on their inflated sense of skill.  As Konnikova asserts, “we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.”
• Studies show that people often ignore statistics and probabilities in favor of their personal experiences, intuition, or “gut feelings.”  They make decisions based on their prior experiences, or the experiences of people they know, not what the data shows them.
• Konnikova believes that Texas hold’em is the poker game that best represents life.  It is the perfect balance of chance and skill.  Like Texas hold’em, life is no limit.  There are no restrictions, and anybody can go “all in” at any time.
• Poker is not gambling.  You can win with the worst hand and lose with the best hand.  With other games, you must have the best to win.  Konnikova explains, “And that, in a nutshell, is why poker is a skilled endeavor rather than a gambling one.”
• Betting is vital to poker; it is how we learn.  Konnikova: “Our minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake, in the outcome of our learning.”  And what we learn in poker, among other things, is probabilistic thinking.
• Additionally, poker develops the abilities of critical thinking and self-assessment.  You must learn to objectively evaluate your situation in each hand and how to play it properly.  It is especially important to remain objective when you’re losing.  Always remain objective - don’t let winning go to your head or blame losing on luck.
• View poker as an inquiry.  There isn’t one way to play a certain hand every time.  The same hand can be played different ways against the same opponents in the same position.  Each hand and each play must be carefully analyzed and stand on its own.  Konnikova says, “It’s a constant process of inquiry.  A hand can be played any number of ways, as long as the thought process is there… There is no certainty.  There is only thought.”  Consequently, poker teaches self-awareness and self-discipline.
• Poker teaches you to be comfortable with uncertainty.  You don’t know what card will be dealt next or what cards your opponents have.  You have to embrace that uncertainty.
• Poker teaches you to focus.  You must continually focus on your opponents to learn their behaviors and betting patterns.  Focus is a mitigator to overconfidence; it forces you to reevaluate your knowledge and make different decisions as you gather more information. Konnikova observes, “In an age of constant distraction and neverending connectivity, we may be so busy that we miss the signals that tell us to swerve before we’re in the bad beat’s path.”  We must remain focused to avoid missing vital information.
• Your attitude helps dictate your success.  If you see your losses or bad beats as the consequence of fortune, you’ll miss what you could have done differently to win.  Don’t blame your success or failure on outside forces.  Always be thinking about how your decisions led to the result and how it can be done differently next time.  It’s about the process, not the result.
• We instantly make judgments about people we don’t know when we see them.  Those impressions are based on stereotypes and our past experiences with people with similar traits.  For example, Konnikova played poker with a bald guy with tattoos.  She assumed he was an aggressive player; instead, he was among the tightest players on the circuit.  How often do we make incorrect judgments about people we don’t know?
• Fluidity is a tell.  Confident people, or players with strong hands, move quickly and decisively.  It usually means their thought process is clear.
• We must learn to control what we can.  “Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal.  Without us to supply meaning, it’s simple noise.  The most we can do is learn to control what we can - our thinking, our decision processes, our reactions,” says Konnikova.

 

Eternal Life is in the BODY? Really?

May 4, 2022

What did Paul actually teach would happen after death?  It was not that after you died your soul would go to heaven or hell.  Paul taught a future physical resurrection of your *body*, to have eternal life here on earth.  I started explaining that in my previous post.  I continue here: Paul’s argument for a coming resurrection of the dead.  Again, this is taken from my discussion in Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020).

 

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Paul’s Teaching of the Resurrection

To make his case (for a physical resurrection of all people at the end of time), Paul begins the chapter (1 Corinthians 15)  by summarizing what the Corinthians came to believe when they first joined the Christian community, that Christ died for sins and was raised from the dead, and after his resurrection he was seen not only by his disciples but by a large number of people, including 500 at one time and, finally, by Paul himself (1 Corinthians 15:1-8).  All these people actually saw Jesus.  That’s because he was physically raised.

For most Jews, like Paul, “resurrection” always and incontrovertibly meant   “resurrection of the body.”  It involved bodies coming back to life.  This Jewish notion of resurrection stood, therefore, in contrast to the Greek view of the immortality of the soul.[1]

Paul wants to insist that those who are “in Christ” will have the same experience Jesus did.  If Christ was raised (bodily!), so will they be.  Conversely, if they are not to be raised, then Christ must not have been.  And if Christ was not raised, he did not bring salvation, and those who thought they had been made right with God in fact will not be saved (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).

But for Paul (and his original converts) Christ has been raised and for that reason he can be called the “first fruits of the resurrection” (1 Corinthians 15:20).  This is an agricultural image.  The part of the harvest brought in on the first day (the “first” fruits) is like the harvest to come thereafter.   The wheat harvested on day one is, in substance, no different from that on day two.  Jesus thus shows what will happen to his followers.  Just as he came back with a bodily substance, so too will they.

Some of the Corinthians raised an obvious objection to the idea of resurrection, which Paul states in order to answer.  Over the ages, others have had similar difficulties: My body is the source of all my problems!  I may not even like my body.  And you are saying that I have to live in it forever?  That’s ridiculous.  The body grows old, gets injured, sickens, dies, and corrupts  We have to live eternity like that?  And even more: which body, exactly, is raised?  The one I had as a teenager?  At the height of my physical prowess?  As it is when I am old and infirm?  Really?  And will it have all the same physical defects, injuries, and wounds?  Will blind people be blind forever?  The paralyzed paralyzed?  Those born with birth defects forced to have them for eternity?  As the Corinthians mockingly stated the objection: “How are the dead raised?  With what kind of body do they come?”   (1 Corinthians 15:35).

In their own historical context, these first-century Corinthian opponents of Paul– especially those born and raised in Greek culture with ideas that had trickled down from Plato – may have had a deeper problem:  for them, the body was made of coarse, gross stuff that had to be dispensed with so the more highly refined and immortal soul could live on.   Paul, though, has a different idea.   He does not at all believe in the immortality of the soul.  But when he speaks of the future resurrection, he is also not referring to the simple revivification of the dead corpse, brought back to life from a Near Death Experience.   For Paul there are bodies and then there are bodies.  The resurrected body he imagines will be utterly and completely transformed.  It will be a different kind of body.

Paul argues that the human body that goes into the ground is like a “bare kernel” of some kind of grain that grows into a plant.  What grows is intimately tied to and related to what went into the ground; but it is also vastly different.  When you plant an acorn it doesn’t grow into a forty-foot acorn, but into an oak tree.    So too the human.  When the body comes out of the ground it is transformed into “the body that God gives it, as he wishes” (15:38).   That is because “there are heavenly bodies, and earthly bodies” and they have different kind of glories, just as there is “one glory for the sun, another glory for the moon, and another for the stars; even the stars differ in glory from one to the next” (15:40-41).

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I conclude this mini-thread in my next post, where I deal with the most widely-misunderstood verse in all of Paul’s writings:  “Flesh and blood will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”  That means their eternal life will be *spiritual*, not *bodily*, right?  Nope.  Wrong.

 

[1] As with all things Jewish, there are of course isolated exceptions, as seen, for example, in the book of Jubilees (23:30-31), as my friend and perennial corrector Joel Marcus has pointed out to me.

 

Understanding the Future Resurrection of the Dead…

May 3, 2022

One of the most important issues for the apostle Paul is the future resurrection of the dead.  It is also one of the must misunderstood topics among readers of Paul today, who often claim that Paul had just the *opposite* view to the one he had.  And that’s because they completely misconstrue his understanding of Jesus’ own resurrection.  If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it 834,000 times: “Paul thought Jesus was raised spiritually, not bodily.”   Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It will take a while to explain.  I deal with the matter in my book Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020).  Here is the first bit of what I say there.

 

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 The Glorious Transformation of the Resurrected Body

Undoubtedly the most important passage for Paul’s view of the future resurrection is 1 Corinthians 15.   The chapter, in fact, is often called “the resurrection chapter.”  It is also one of the most misread passages in all of the New Testament.  Many casual readers have thought Paul wrote it in order to prove that Jesus was raised from the dead.  That was not why.  The chapter assumes Jesus was raised, as both Paul and his Corinthian readers know.  It uses this assumption in order to build the case Paul wants to make for the naysayers among his readers: there will be a future resurrection for Jesus’ followers, a resurrection like Jesus’ own.  Dead bodies will come back to life.  But not in the state in which they were buried.  They will be completely transformed and made into immortal, spiritual bodies.  They will still be bodies.  But they will be glorified, just as Jesus’ body was.

To make sense of the passage we need   a bit of context.  Paul founded the church in the city of Corinth, located on an isthmus on the eastern side of Achaia, sometime after his mission to the Thessalonians.   As always happened, once the church was established and running, Paul left the fledgling community to move on to other missionary grounds.  Sometime later, he learned of problems that the Corinthian church was having.  They were serious indeed: massive and deep divisions in the church; considerable infighting among the factions that supported one leader or another; cases of rank immorality, including Christian men visiting prostitutes and bragging about it in church and one man sleeping with his stepmother; chaotic scenes in the worship services, including the weekly communion supper, with some members coming early to gorge themselves and drinking all the wine and the poorer members arriving late when there was nothing left.  Paul writes his letter to deal with such problems, one by one.

But he saves the problem he considered most threatening to the life of the community for last.  It may not seem as serious to modern readers.  Paul was astounded by the theological claim of some of the Corinthian believers that:  “There is no resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:12).  Paul sees this as a major problem because his entire gospel message hinges on the apocalyptic realities of the future climax of God’s cosmic plan.  And so he spends the entire chapter trying to prove that in fact there will be a real, physical, glorious, future resurrection in which bodies come back to life and are transformed into immortal beings.  It apparently was a hard sell.

Scholars have debated why this was even an issue for these believers in Jesus.  It is not obvious what they thought the alternative was.  Some interpreters have thought the Corinthians must have denied there was any life after death, but that can’t be right.  Later in the chapter Paul reminds them, in maddeningly vague terms, that they practice baptism for the dead:  “If the dead are not raised at all, why are some baptized for them?” (15:29). It is altogether unclear what the Corinthians were doing in these “baptisms for the dead,” and there have been roughly twenty thousand interpretations over the years.  Are living Christians being baptized as stand-ins for Christians who came to faith but were not baptized before they died?  Are they being baptized for unconverted dead relatives, in hopes this will secure their salvation?  Or for dead people generally, to make salvation possible, say, to those who lived before Christ?  Or for … something else?  We don’t know.  But the verse almost certainly shows they believed in some kind of life after death, because baptism appears to have been efficacious in some way for those who have passed on.

Then why do they reject the idea that the dead will be raised?   Other scholars have maintained that the offending Corinthians do not believe in a future resurrection of believers because they, like other Christians we know about from later times, believed followers of Jesus had already in some sense been “raised from the dead” when they came to faith in Christ and were baptized (see, for example, Ephesians 2:1-6).  That may be the case, but Paul does not explicitly say anything specifically about the Corinthians believing they were already resurrected believers.  These scholars may be reading a later Christian view into this early Pauline writing.

It may be simplest to think that these former pagan converts have brought their original understanding of the afterlife with them into their Christian faith.  As Greek-speaking and Greek-influenced pagans, they would have been raised on the very Platonic idea that the soul is immortal and cannot die, and that life after death involves a separation of the soul from the body, for a soulish existence forever.  Possibly these pagan converts still think so as Christians.  For them, there is no resurrection of the dead because life in the body forever is an absurd, even repulsive idea.  The body is the problem.  What lives on is the soul.  If this view is correct, then Paul writes to correct them in their view.  Just as Jesus was bodily raised from the dead, so too will be his followers, at the end of time, in the climactic moment of all of history.

 

I will discuss Paul’s response to this issue – in which he discusses how he understands Jesus’ own resurrection – in the next post.

 The truth is that white evangelicals are, in fact, a shrinking portion of the American public, but not because of immigration or Black Lives Matter or antifa or any of the other bogeymen that Republican propagandists prop up. It's because of evangelicals' own intolerance and bigotry. Younger Americans simply don't truck with it — even at Liberty University, students speak out about it! — and so are leaving the pews in large numbers. Heaven forbid, however, that evangelicals admit they only have themselves to blame and change their views to become more accepting of diversity. Instead, white evangelicals are embracing conspiracy theories, Trumpism, and, ultimately, a war on democracy itself. 

-Amanda Marcotte in Salon.com

Anna Quindlen - Write for Your Life - Notes

Anna Quindlen is a prolific writer of fiction.  Though I have never read her I am captivated by this short book on how important writing is.  She says everyone should be a writer.  This little book is a primer on the importance of writing.

She begins with the diary of Anne Frank, the most famous diary of all-time.  Anne was talking to herself as all diarists do, but since her father luckily discovered the diary after she had been killed by the Nazis, millions of people have read her talking to herself,  She called her diary Kitty,  Talking to Miss Kitty!

Sadly she points out that technology changes have killed the old-fashioned letter.  How sad.  P. 39

She was part of the last generation when a long distance call was an pricey item.  "Who called Pittsburgh?" her father would ask. Or you would call person-to-person so you wouldn't be charged if your intended person could not answer.   P. 40

Why write a letter when you can send am email.  P. 41

But a handwritten letter can make a person feel special.  A hand-written letter is like a gift.  P. 42

In praise of letters.  How will historians do without them?  P. 49

Neat chapter on doctors who write.  Writing makes doctors better doctors.  Many of them need to learn how to relate to their patients.  Writing can make them whole again in their clinical work.  P. 76

Writing can humanize doctors.

The vocabulary of suffering is not the vocabulary of science but that of human interaction.  P. 77

Health professionals who write develop empathy for their patients.  This author notes how cold medicine has become in recent years.  Touch is important for health professionals.  Some of them can do it; many of them can't.

I myself write to live.

Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone.  Solitude expresses glory of being alone.  P. 101

Writing is undoubtedly  interaction with another human being even if that human being is only yourself.  P. 104

Digital content doesn't mean that print should not exist.  P. 105

Is technology pushing serious writing to the edges of our life?  P. 105

There is no safe place in a wired world.  P. 107

Waiting for the right time to write may mean you will wait forever.  P. 109

Just get it written.  P. 110

------------------------------------------------------------------------

INTERJECTION

"Writers drink.  There's no way around that.  They do.  It is one of the main perils of writing."

Mark Edmundson - Why Write? P. 103

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Writing is therapeutic and necessary for every literate person.  This seems like the basic message of this book.

J.P. Morgan collected handwritten manuscripts and documents.  Reminds me of that museum in Austin.  P. 114

Bleak House is Dickens best the author says.  P. 115

Morgan has the only original of A Christmas Carol in his museum in NYC.  P. 115

The point is that Morgan collected print.  

So glad I am a print native.

Dickens did a lot of rewriting and cutting.  P. 116

Dickens obviously wrote cursively.  The personal touch of handwriting is irreplaceable.

"I like writing things out in longhand."  Barack Obama  P. 119

Thinking about that book building a bridge to the 18th Century.

I looked at two of Quindlen's novels today but decided to pass.

Jennifer Egan writes in longhand.   I understand.  It's the way to really feel the words.  P. 119

Drafts disappear inside the computer.  P. 121

Good penmanship is as quaint as it can be.  P. 124

Should poetry always be handwritten?  P. 127

Suffice it to say this book is an exhortation that everyone could benefit from writing.

Maraniss Biography of Jim Thorpe Review

 Path Lit by Lightning

The Life of Jim Thorpe

By David Maraniss

A riveting new biography of America’s greatest all-around athlete by the bestselling author of the classic biography When Pride Still Mattered.

Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. He won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw’s New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind.

But despite his colossal skills, Thorpe’s life was a struggle against the odds. As a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he encountered duplicitous authorities who turned away from him when their reputations were at risk. At Carlisle, he dealt with the racist assimilationist philosophy “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” His gold medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball. His later life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress. He roamed from state to state and took bit parts in Hollywood, but even the film of his own life failed to improve his fortunes. But for all his travails, Thorpe did not succumb. The man survived, complications and all, and so did the myth.

Path Lit by Lightning is a great American story from a master biographer.

Learn More

Hardcover

LIST PRICE $29.99

 

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I've been belching up bacon since breakfast. I've been singing "Hey, Jude" all day and I can't stop. I've been looking for love in all the wrong places. Yet I've got to admit it's getting better, a little better all the time.