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Poker author Ed Miller, the brains behind March book club selection Playing the Player among other great titles, gives generously of his time for both a regular interview and a thorough discussion of his book. We talk about the unconventional beginning to his poker career, co-authoring a book with David Sklansky, and veganism in Las Vegas.
Book Club
The book is just a starting point! Ed responds to listener questions and Andrew and Nate’s critiques with some of the best strategy discussion the show has seen to date. Topics include multi-way pots, re-exploiting players trying to exploit you, concealing information from tough opponents, categorizing opponents, and much more! Even if you haven’t read the book, you want to hear this in-depth strategy discussion.
Ed is @EdMillerPoker on Twitter. His self-published books, plus a lot of free strategy content, information about coaching, etc., are available from his website.
Next Month
Next month we’ll be reading Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker. In Episode 26, we’ll discuss Part I: Universal Elements, which runs through page 84 of the book.
Timestamps
For disclosure I do have a financial interest. Putting that aside and trying to be balanced and rational. It is a bit of a false dichotomy that is presented, as consumers we have more choices than “torturing” and factory farming or veganism. I buy my meat from my local butcher, I know the farmer, the slaughterhouse, the workers and the vet. The standards of animal husbandry are very high, as is the quality of the meat.
I think the bigger inconsistency, rather than hypocrisy is not ‘eating honey’ or ‘stepping on spiders’, but consuming products made by human beings in truly awful conditions.
A far better argument for veganism is the necessity of sustainability with a large and growing world population in my opinion.
Nice post.
I wholeheartedly agree re: local butchers. I don’t think it’s wrong to kill most kinds of animal for food. A couple times I think both Andrew and I hinted that our own views on this are more nuanced than just “don’t eat meat.” The reason I call myself a vegetarian is that (i) it’s a decent approximation and (ii) I think it would be really presumptuous of me to think that the average person I’m having a casual conversation with would care to know the details of my diet.
I also think that there are in some sense more airtight arguments against factory farming than just appealing to hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of nonstop torture. One can refuse to care about torture in ways that I think one cannot refuse to care about epidemiological and environmental consequences. But those other arguments require empirical claims that are somewhat harder to establish.
You are half the show Nate! Shower us with your nuances! Details details says I! Do you have recent stool sample results uploaded somewhere for public consumption?
As the other half of the show, I hereby object to to public consumption of Nate’s stool samples.
Well, if you really care, Gareth, here are roughly the rules I give myself:
(1) Do not eat factory-farmed meat. Assume that meat you encounter, even if it’s labeled “grass-fed” or “free-range” or “local” or whatever, is factory-farmed (because it probably is). (Most of us are not in BRaven’s situation.)
(2) Prefer non-fish protein sources to fish protein sources.
(3) Exception to (1): if you happen upon some factory-farmed meat that will just get thrown away or wasted, it’s OK to eat it. (I get the wrong order at a sandwich shop, a friend orders chicken wings and gets full before he eats the last three, etc.)
(4) Meat or not, prefer food the production of which has consequences that are least bad. (But you are not obligated to study the economics of food for 10 hours a week.)
(5) Don’t be a smug prick about your diet. (E.g.: If someone offers you a small portion of something that might have been made with trace amounts of chicken broth or something, accept politely.)
In lieu of stool sample results I guess the fans of the show can accept this smugly as sufficient curiosity compensation.
This is interesting.
My wife and I were mild vegetarians (i.e. virtually never ate meat at home; rarely ordered meat at restuarants; but never turned down meat dishes at other people’s houses) for about 5 or 6 years. Mostly for health reasons, but also with some tilt toward the ethics.
Then we had kids.
Since then we’ve more or less gone back to eating meat at home. Not as often as most people do, but not so rarely anyone would ever notice if they stayed with us for a week. And the reason, right or wrong, is that we’ve found it much easier to fill kids up in a healthy way if you let them eat meat. We try to emphasize vegetables, grains, and fruit, but the real enemy, we’ve come to believe, is sugar and, in particular, corn syrup.
We try to keep almost no corn syrup products in our house, but if you don’t want kids begging for sugar-based food (i.e. fruit juice), you more or less have to either (a) never allow them to *ever* have any, and keep none in your house, or (b) fill them up with healthy food so they aren’t hungry. If you want to try (a), that means no OJ, no maple syrup, no cookies, no ice cream, etc. I’ve found that it’s just easier to try to fill them with healthy food. It seems to be working. But the catch is that we pretty much have to serve them chicken and fish. They just don’t seem to fill up on milk, fruits and vegetables, and grains. And once you are cooking meat for kids, it’s pretty much a pain to cook a separate meal for adults.
Now, part of this is probably that I’m lazy. And that I don’t have the heart to be mean and tell them they can’t have food X when they are hungry and that they should have thought about that when they passed up more broccoli. They could probably learn to fill up such that they didn’t need meat and wouldn’t beg for the sugar-stuff. And heck, I’d like to go back to soft vegetarianism and we probably will when the kids are older. But right now, it seems like a massive amount of work and effort.
Which is a really long way of saying that while I find the ethics somewhat important, the health side of eating me, to me, is outweighed by the sugar problem. Especially with kids.
BTW, I should mention that one of my friends from grad school wrote one of the more popular recent books about factory farmings — Every Seven Seconds. I highly recommend it — he worked undercover in a slaughterhouse for a year for his dissertation project. I wrote a review on my blog sometime back: http://www.mattglassman.com/?p=3038.
matt
That book sounds interesting. I will give it a look.
Ed:
I absentmindedly wrote the wrong title of the book. It’s “Every Twelve Seconds” and the author is Tim Pachirat.
Yeah, these are good points.
I myself have a big appetite and had a hard time, for a while, satisfying my hunger on my pescetarian-ish diet. I lost a bunch of–too much–weight without really realizing what was going on. But it turns out that beans, nuts, soy products, etc. can all be very satisfying.
But if I had kids I imagine the whole equation would change–obviously their health and well-being would come first. And it’s much easier to manage oneself than to manage a bigger family…
Pretty much this. As I mentioned, I do occasionally eat meat, and I agree with Nate that there are a lot of reasons even for people who don’t care about animal welfare to want to avoid factory farmed meat.
BRaven,
I don’t view veganism as an exercise in personal ethics. I personally don’t much care if you squash bugs or eat honey or eat meat or buy sweatshop clothes. Because for me, veganism is not about how you or I behave on an individual level.
I view veganism as a social justice movement whose goal is (or should be) to elevate animals to the level of personhood and to stamp out the ways animals are systematically and cruelly exploited.
Many people in this country, for instance, already accept the personhood of dogs. But fewer extend that personhood to pigs, even though dogs and pigs are far more similar than they are different. Yet if these same people actually meet a living, breathing pig, they will easily accept that particular pig’s personhood.
I don’t believe raising pigs for slaughter is any more appropriate than raising dogs for slaughter.
However, for now I view factory farming as the exploitation that dwarfs them all… forms of human exploitation included. It’s in the numbers and the sheer horror of it. Billions of animals per year, and the exploitation so thoroughly complete. So it’s my focus. Educate people who don’t know about what goes on in factory farms and build up popular sentiment against them. Most people still just don’t know, but when they learn, they do not like it at all.
From my perspective, if you reject factory farming practices and you do your best to avoid the products of factory farming, you’re on my team. Maybe you can’t (or don’t want to) call yourself “vegan”, but that’s not so relevant to me. I’d just like to get to the point where society generally condemns factory farming and refuses to tolerate the everyday cruelty.
(BTW, my viewpoint is not at all typical of vegans.)
Ed,
I’ll politely disagree with you. It is hard to present my view with out it appearing disrespectful or offensive/confrontational. I do feel obliged to point out that pigs and dogs are not sentient creatures. I think talking about pigs as having ‘personhood’ is making common cognitive bias and anthropomorphising, and that it is easier to do the less time you spend around livestock.
I also recognize that this isn’t really the place for this discussion.
I thought the interview was entertaining and what I’ve had time to read of the book well written.
thanks,
B. Raven.
I’m glad you agree that this issue depends heavily on the question whether pigs and dogs, etc., are “sentient” creatures.
Obviously I think they are sentient. I don’t think that one can “point out” that dogs are not sentient–it’s part of how we use the phrase “point out” that it implies that what’s at issue is a logical, conceptual, or obvious mistake. If dogs are not sentient, that is not a conceptual or logical truth. It is certainly not obvious to most people who have worked with dogs.
Some people claim to find it obvious that pigs are not sentient, but it’s useful to keep in mind that the pigs those people interact with have been tortured and kept in small cages their whole lives. It is also useful to keep in mind that people claimed that human slaves were not sentient–or at least not sentient in the way that their masters were.
Thank you for being polite–I hope I have been as polite as you have. But it is very difficult to see claims like yours repeated as obvious truths, the denial of which must be a conceptual mistake, the result of a “common cognitive bias,” or the result of naivete, without responding strongly. My wife was raised on a farm; I have studied animal behavior in some detail; interaction with animals in my experience is _positively_, not negatively, correlated with the belief that they have the sort of inner experience that we often think comes along with the right to moral concern.
The history of “anti-anthropomorphizing” philosophies of mind is very interesting. Much could be said about them; suffice to say that most of them grew out of commitments in the philosophy of science that are now in the scrap-heap of intellectual history.
Personally I don’t feel nearly well-read/-educated enough to form a definitive opinion on the sentient/non-sentient debate. It does at least seem to me not to be an open-and-shut case that animals aren’t sentient, which leads to a few problems:
1. David Foster Wallace, among many others, points, in Consider the Lobster, to the problem that people who decide they have a right to eat animals (or experiment on them, etc.) are obviously and inextricably biased in making that determination.
2. When in doubt, I’d prefer to err on the side of doing no harm.
3. Arguably, the simple perception of pain may be sufficient to give animals a moral standing where it comes to deliberately causing them pain.
FWIW, there are some people out there who would deny that animals feel pain. (There is a line of philosophical reasoning purporting to show that linguistic abilities are necessary for a mental state to count as pain and not merely something that bears a superficial similarity to pain.)
I think that argument obviously fails–but it’s worth noting that people on both sides of this debate occasionally claim to be obvious propositions that are in fact disputed.
The sentience debate seems to me mostly linguistic–or, at least, it seems unproductive because the central terms are not defined carefully enough. Surely there are better ways to investigate the ethics of factory farming?
I think you can go one step further. I think sentience has to hinge on self awareness rather than language per se, otherwise we can ascribe sentience to reflexive biological reactions within creatures with no nervous system.
Self awareness is relatively easy to test clinically. As far as I am aware there is only empirical evidence of this characteristic in elephants, apes, humans and some dolphin species and as such I think you can only class those creatures as sentient. I should have phrased my initial comment differently. I *point out* that dogs and pigs are not self aware, we can test for this and the evidence shows that they are not. I think that logically you cannot have sentience without self awareness.
I would also add that I think anthropomorphising is a healthy cognitive bias, and I believe that animal cruelty is a problem, but that is because of what it says about the people involved rather than believing that rationally animals have ‘personhood’.
The distinction you draw between “livestock” and animals is a spurious one. Livestock are animals, full stop. It’s true that most people (including me) may have little experience on a farm, but many more people have plenty of experience around animals. I’ve lived with animals my entire life.
While those who raise and slaughter animals do not necessarily have any more knowledge about the nature of animals than anyone else, they do have a vested interest in drawing bright-line distinctions between animals who are “livestock” and those who aren’t.
The first step to working through this issue is to throw that distinction out the window.
I’m only half way through, but i was pretty shocked to realise that I’m way behind the game with my stalled novel projects. I’ve only got 2, and they’re mostly concept + a few paragraphs. Must try harder.
Don’t worry, buddy, you’re not behind me. I was being charitable to myself when I said a chapter or two.
Yeah, if I’m ahead of this, it’s not by much…
Great! I was heading to thinkingporker.net but I was afraid I’d left out the r until I got to the comments section.
Awesome Awesome Awesome book and podcast gentlemen. I am on board. I just got the next book for April and will have my reading assignment done by Tuesday.
Thank you Ed for still having an enthusiasm for the game after 10 years. This makes it fun to learn from you.
Dear BRaven (we seem to have exceeded the maximum thread depth, so I can’t reply directly):
“Self awareness is relatively easy to test clinically.”
Well, there’s the “mirror test,” which I think you’re talking about, but who says that self-awareness exactly tracks performance on the mirror test?
You can do the mirror test, but that doesn’t solve all questions of sentience or self-awareness or ethical regard.
All that said: I really respect that you’ve thought a lot about these issues and are willing to bite various bullets and try to justify your stance. Also, I’m sure you pay extra in money and effort to eat from local butchers. If everyone had your level of knowledge and thoughtfulness about this issue, I think we would all be much better off.
yes, aiui, Octopuses are a good example of a creature which, while highly intelligent, are so fundamentally different in their make up that something like the mirror test begins to look very anthropocentric.
I’m a card carrying member of the ‘large animals are self-evidently sentient’ camp, although I don’t believe that that’s a magic bullet for the ethical question of eating meat. I do however think that it cautions us to give a good deal of thought to how we go about eating them, if we do.
This show made me realise that I’ve become lazy about trusting a sticker on the side of the packet as a guarantee of animal welfare, where I probably need to be more proactive. (To say nothing about autopiloting my way around a poker table where I could be thinking ahead)
I would like to thank Andrew for his forbearance on this issue. It is a matter that people feel very strongly about, and are unlikely to change their view. I’ve tried very hard not to to take or give offence easily.
Indeed, self awareness might not track the mirror test, and we could debate the epistemology of the issue, given that our only understanding of intelligence is very strictly bound by our bias of human experience. But I would be interested to hear why self awareness might not be an appropriate dividing line, because to me that is absolutely critical to giving any meaning to the words that we use.
Perhaps again I phrased what I wanted to say incorrectly, but, I think as humans we ascribe intelligence, motivation and emotion far too readily to processes that are simply evolved or reflexive. One only has to look at the emergent behaviour of a bee hive or ant hill to see that simple rules can give rise to processes that we would describe as deeply intelligent that cannot logically have feeling or emotion.
If I believed that pigs were self aware I would struggle to be as libertarian and polite as most people are on the issue.
I think Ed misunderstood me, I don’t use livestock as a pejorative or diminutive. I have a greater respect and hold in higher esteem a working cow than a handbag dog.
I declared a financial interest initially. I have been very fortunate and I use a lot of my income locally. I am a silent partner in quite a few local businesses. I’ve been happy to fund a local farm and butcher that are break even enterprises. They have the very highest standards of animal husbandry. They provide local employment and healthy free range food at a price that is competitive enough that pensioners in my district can afford to shop with us rather than use cheap battery farmed goods.
The bigger bullet in my opinion that you have sensibly avoided though is what that would be ‘logically’ implied by my views with regard to human beings that “fail” the mirror test. And at this point I fall back on not being a calculating machine and happily allowing my conscience to be my guide, however “irrational”.
However on the flip side, I would strongly challenge Ed’s notion that we can create an equality or compare cruelty or suffering. And I would without offence reject the notion that you can compare animal suffering with human suffering. I don’t think that saying that numerically it is larger is sufficient to draw that inequality.
I figured there was no reason to ask you about humans that fail the mirror test–there are all sorts of reasons to show regard for 1-year-olds, the severely emotionally impaired, etc. No reason to ask “gotcha” questions, much less ones that there are easy answers to.
If you agree that the mirror test might not be a reliable guide to whatever it is that grounds ethical regard, I don’t know how one can justifiably believe that pigs and dogs and so on don’t have whatever that kind of experience is. And if you agree that the mirror test isn’t such a guide, I’d be interested to hear you justify your earlier claim that “self-awareness is relatively easy to test clinically.” What did you mean?
Agreed that all sorts of things that appear intelligent might not be. The history of ideas is littered with such mistakes. But another piece of litter in the history of ideas is behaviorism: the idea that (among other things) the best and only way to be scientifically respectable and overcome “the bias of human experience” and so on is to “operationalize” concepts like “self-awareness,” “intelligence,” and so on (not to mention time and space).
As far as I can tell, this sort of behavioralist/operationalist legacy is what’s behind many arguments against anthropomorphizing animals. And I think it’s not a useful framework for deciding important questions. One can simply declare that “self-awareness” just _is_ the propensity to pass the mirror test, but then you’re just left to explain why that test tracks anything worth caring about (much less worth grounding ethical regard with).
For whatever it’s worth, I have changed my mind before on this issue as a result of argument, and am open to doing so again.
Thanks again for the discussion.
Nate,
I can think of scenarios where the mirror test is inapplicable, ie animals without sight, however for the case of pig, dog, or elephant then there is reason to believe that it is.
It isn’t clear to me if you would agree that you can’t have sentience without self awareness? Because I believe that is almost by definition you cannot be conscious and not have self awareness. I think the neurological evidence would agree with this; your body shows the same reactions when you are under anaesthetic to pain, ie your body’s nerves are still going to fire, but does that pain have any meaning if you are unconscious?
You could argue that we should start with the initial hypothesis that all animals are self aware and that we need to find evidence that shows they are not. I don’t think the hypothesis is scientific, it is not falsifiable as it doesn’t predict how it would manifest itself. I would agree that the mirror test does not negate that hypothesis.
On a practical basis conscious thought appears to be very rare, and I think it very likely that a self aware being would pass the mirror test if physically capable and as such I think it reasonable to think it very unlikely that these creatures are self aware but that it is undetected. We’re betting people, adjusting my bayesian prior, I’d bet against it.
Otherwise I think you are left with trying to draw an even more arbitrary line as to what has a right to life, why should we show a preference to one form of reaction to the environment such as a nervous system to say that of phototrophic response?
B.R
Lively discussion, esp. on veganism, ethics and animal rights. I’ve been following a vegan diet for nearly 3 years after hearing T.Colin Campbell, author of The China Study, speak. He is a venerable man in his 70s who grew up on a farm and dedicated his life to helping alleviate world hunger. His research surprised him. Animal products, including dairy, “turn on” the cancer switch so to speak. In their initial attempts to improve the nutrition and add protein to children’s diets, they inadvertently increased the cancer rate. Numerous studies have since implicated animal products in most chronic conditions. The top 10-15 killers, including cancer and heart disease as your guest indicated, are reversable with a whole-foods, plant-based diet.
Good resources on this include T.Colin Campbell,PhD., Caldwell Esselston, MD, Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine (Dr. Neal Barnard I believe), and Dean Ornish, cardiologist. Dr. Gregor has a website and blog with videos at nutritionfacts.org. He compiles research for the viewer to glean. Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilemma) is a good source for moderates as he discusses grass-fed, free-range, etc. GMOs are a huge concern in plants and animals. GMO salmon has been approved by the FDA so watch out!
As for me, I will say that I follow a vegan diet with some exceptions. When people prepare a vegetarian meal not realizing that dairy is vegan, I graciously accept and eat the least dairy possible. When I’m on the road I bring my own food as much as possible and choose the healthiest, least animal-harming options. Socially, I believe it is important to minimize the hostility that can occur when someone calls themselves a vegan. Usually I will recommend a whole foods, plant-based diet. Basically, I find that if I meet people where they are and don’t preach or act holier than thou, I get better responses.
I’m glad Ed Miller started the Vegas Veg group, and brings the message to college students. When I first started teaching at the community college and showed the students the PETA film they became defensive and thought the film was overly inflammatory. Now I show them Forks over Knives (good case studies of folks like Ed Miller who have reversed their health problems) and i also recommend Peaceable Kingdom. This film won documentary awards and tells the story of farmers who gave up farming because of the cruelty and started animal sanctuaries. They show how 4 H requires the kids to swallow their emotions when their prized animal is sent to slaughter, and tell the story of farmers who became seriously ill from pesticides, etc.
According to the VP of PETA, good reasons to become vegan include: human rights, animal rights, health of the individual, and of the planet. There is less environmental impact from vegan diet and driving a hummer than consuming meat and driving a Prius.
I won’t go into the whole sentient being discussion. My understanding of the Buddhist monks who are basically vegetarian is that, when they hold out their bowls they accept and eat whatever people give them. If it’s good enough for the Dalai Lama, it should be good enough for us.
Thanks, Ed, Nate, Andrew, and bloggers!
I thought this would be relevant ITT:
http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298