I have a bit of free time now so I'm going to answer the (few) non-book related questions I said I would.

So let's start it off with the graph:

A few things to note:

1) Probably 80%+ of these hands are played on full tilt (under the screen name ThePwninator), and 80%+ are NL$200. A good chunk are rush, so you won't see all of them if you use PTR (assuming PTR still works for tilt, I'm not sure).

2) These are the last 500k hands I've played, and from my old computer. I have not played since Black Friday, as I live in California and cannot realistically leave.

3) The majority of the content in the book I didn't know when these hands were played. That's not to say I have a problem with these results, as my EV was probably around $80-$100/hr or so after rakeback and I'd love to be able to do that again. I just don't want people to assume these hands were played with me knowing as much as I do now, as that wasn't the case. I ended up pursuing theory stuff more aggressively after Black Friday largely because I couldn't play.


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

Now let's get to the questions:

Question #1: Why 3-bet more OOP than IP?

Answer: It's impossible to solve for optimal pre-flop sizing, and a GTO player would almost certainly use multiple ranges with many different bet sizings pre-flop. In other words, optimal pre-flop ranges probably will look like a total mess to a non-computer.

The idea behind 3-betting bigger when OOP than IP is it's much more difficult for your opponent to call a 3-bet when he's OOP. So, if the opponent is going to emphasize 4-betting or folding, it helps to make the 3-bet smaller, as that keeps his range wider and forces him to defend more aggressively. Additionally, position gets more valuable as stack depth increases, so by 3-betting smaller you increase effective stack sizes post-flop. This would also keep stacks deeper if your opponent 4-bets and you respond by calling (which you'll often want to do, as his 4-betting range should be VERY polarized, and by calling rather than 5-betting all-in we keep our positoinal advantage).

There's more than just this, but hopefully this gives you a good idea of why making small bets or raises in position is often effective. A lot of cool examples regarding small bets in position are included in the book.

Also (Winged Guy) your opponent gets better pot odds as you 3-bet smaller. I'm not sure if you just wrote it incorrectly or you're actually confused about this, but it should be pretty obvious why.

Additionally, when 3-betting from the blinds, the term "value 3-bet" and "bluff 3-bet" don't really work all that well. Again, this is explained in more detail in the book, and I'll go into even more detail in future CardRunners videos as my blind play has changed quite a bit recently (but I'm still experimenting with it).

Question #2: Are there electronic versions of the book?

Answer: See this thread. http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/33/books-publications/toc-applications-no-limit-hold-em-1299572/ Electronic versions may come out before physical ones.

Question #3: What do checking back ranges look like in position?

Answer: I tend to heavily emphasize checking back hands that keep my opponents dominated hands in. For example, I probably won't bet with AQ on a Ts 4c 2d board if my opponent is going to check-fold AJ or QJ, because I can dominate those hands on the turn. When he has a hand like AJ or QJ, rather than having 6 ours (like 2 overcards usually have) he instead only has 3 outs, and additionally he'll have 2 "tained outs" where he improves to top pair but I have him outkicked.

I'd almost always bet with hands which have little showdown value and retain their equity well. So, it's rare for me to check back a gutshot or something, as those hands usually make the perfect bluffs.

Lastly, I want to bet with hands that are vulnerable to being outdrawn by hands in the opponent's check-folding range. So if I have 88 on a 9c 7c 4h board, even though I can't bet all three streets for value, I'm unlikely to check because then I give free cards to hands like QJ or AJ. So on a 9c 7c 4h board, I may want to check back AcQd, since this way if my opponent has something like KcQh he can turn a dominated pair or once in a while runner runner the 2nd nut flush vs my nut flush. But I'd bet 88 because I want his KQ to go away.

Hey everyone,

The book is now for sale at http://www.professionalpoker.com/Category-524/11/Applications-of-No-Limit-Hold-em and you can use the coupon code ANLH20 for 20% off. It should ship by late mid to late May.

A few people have also been asking me some random poker question that aren't specifically related to the book, and in a bit over a week I plan to make a pretty long post answering most of them as well as posting results/graphs (I take the MCAT on May 11, so I'll likely post soon after that). So feel free to ask any random poker questions you'd like and I'll try to answer them. Just post them in the comments section.

Good luck!

A few people have asked me about the table of contents and it was recently posted on 2+2:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/33/books-publications/toc-applications-no-limit-hold-em-1299572/

I haven't updated this blog with a substantial post in a while, but it's something I plan to start doing again relatively soon. I also plan to make another video or two within the next few weeks, but right now I'm kind of just playing the waiting game waiting for the book to come out and for me to take the MCATs, both of which will likely happen in May.

GL everyone.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/33/books-publications/new-book-announcement-applications-no-limit-hold-em-1263461/

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a poker theory book for a bit under 2 years. It's hard to say exactly how much time I've spent on it, but the manuscript currently represents probably just shy of 1000 hours of work. The reason why I've been able to keep making new theory content since Black Friday is because I've been working on this manuscript. Its clear to me that I don't understand a concept well when I try to explain something and struggle, and throughout working on this project I've had to constantly improve my understanding of how poker works.

I only recently signed a contract with 2+2 and did not know they were going to announce the book until earlier today. The book is still at least a few months away from being published so I still don't know exactly how the final product will look, but I think most readers will be very impressed by its quality and easiness to read. I also hope we'll have at least one more exciting announcement regarding the book before it's released.

The one thing I will say is the book will be around the same difficultly level and approach that I have in my videos. There's more time for discussion in 500+ pages than there is in one hour of video so you should expect to see concepts and ranges explained in more detail, but you do not need to worry about this being an overly abstract or mathematically dense book.

Good luck,

Matt

http://www.cardrunners.com/cr_forums/showthread.php?189392-Theory-Questions-or-HH

gogogogogo

So I haven't updated this blog in a while and figured now would be a good time. I've been debating exactly how I want to spend the free time I have, and have been toying with a few options. I've become very interested in this site that a friend recommended -- http://www.bulletproofexec.com/ The site is run by an extremely successful entrepreneur who pushes science to the extreme to try to improve his life. There is a lot of great information on this site, and a ton of information I use for planning by diet and as of this week taking supplements.

What I'm particularly interested is some of the programs he recommends to improve sleep quality and improve your IQ. Now I'll be the first to admit that I think IQ is in many ways legit and in many ways bullshit. It is legit because people who are good at pattern recognition tend to be good at most other intellectually challenging activities as well. Nevertheless, you're of course going to score better at IQ tests after you've taken them before as you get more comfortable and used to the pacing and problems. Yet to me it makes sense to me to think that you can exercise your brain the same way you can exercise a muscle, so I recently bought the i3mindware program which cost $45. It comes with a money back guarantee if you don't improve your IQ score at least 10 points, so I took the free practice IQ test and will be taking the second free practice IQ test in a couple weeks to see if I score an increase. I'm pretty excited about it.

I started doing the IQ training exercises today, and they will always remain pretty tough but not impossible as the program adjust to the user. I can't remember the last time my brain felt as tired as it had after this session, and it felt tired in a very weird way (like I worked it out). I'm not at all recommending anyone else buy the product as I haven't used it for more than a day, but I'm pretty excited about trying it out and curious to see the results it gives me.

After doing these IQ exercises I think I'm going to look into trying to improve my sleep quality and stress with some of the recommended tools on the site. I really want to try this program http://upgradedself.com/brain-performance/heartmath-emwave2.html, but $250 is a lot to spend on a computer program. I want to research this a bit more, but it seems like a scientific approach to meditating and that's something I'm pretty interested in. Here are some of my short term goals.

1) I banned myself from a few websites where I found myself wasting time. If I am going to spend an extra hour of the day doing something non-productive, I should spend that hour doing something fun. Not browsing the internets and not noticing time passes me by. This is much easier to do if I'm eating and sleeping well as I don't get into a state where I'm "too tired to work but tired enough to go to bed."

2) Do the IQ exercises for a few weeks and see what's up. If it works, check out some other stuff like the heartmath etc.

3) Record how I spend my time through the day. How much of it is school based, poker based, self-improvement based, or just having fun. I need to do this because it's easy to not spend time studying the MCATs since I don't see immediate results like I do when I get paid to teach poker or study before a quiz and get an A.

4) Eat really healthy and start taking the supplements I need to be taking (vitamin D etc).

5) Not be results oriented at all in any aspect of life. It does not matter if it is grades, girls, admission into a medical school, or a new poker video that gets hated on or loved, I'm going to pay as little attention to results as I possibly can.

Basically, I really want to give myself the biggest edge possible in life. I would like to know whenI enter medical school (despite being a few years older than the youngest students) that I am smarter, better organized, know the material better, and have a healthier life style (with regards to stress, diet, and my energy level) than the vast majority of students so I can crush skulls if I need to compete with someone and also just enjoy life more. If I want to play poker if there are legal American sites or write a screenplay while I'm in medical school (and as any 2+2 detective worth his salt will tell you, I've yet to play since Black Friday), I need to be very organized and to find the time to do it AND not be results oriented. If I'm only writing or playing poker a little bit, I can easily (likely) never write a screenplay that sells or go on a very long downswing in poker as I only have a few hours a week to spend on this hobby. And since I'm a guy that really likes doing multiple things without doing one thing too much, I think it is pretty important that I get myself as organized and efficient as possible so I have the greatest chance of succeeding and I need to not care about the results. I will be sure to update this blog with my change in IQ if it changes in a few weeks. Stay classy everyone.

I took a Work, Labor, and Social Justice cluster class at UCLA my freshmen year. The means 18 year old Past Janda, all 120 pounds of hairy, ignorant awesomeness sat his ass down for about 4-8 hours each week for the entire year to learn about the plight of the working man. Here are a few of the topics which continually came up in class:

#1) Union Jobs: Back in the day, people with almost no skill set were able to make the equivalent of around $30 an hour if they got a sweet union job. By the nature of the universe (aka basic economics), these jobs were of course very hard to get because the true equilibrium wage was much lower. Nevertheless, once you got one of these jobs you were pretty set as long as the company didn't move overseas, which was much less practical for a company 50 years ago than it is now.

#2) Wal-Mart is Evil: Wal-Mart is really fucking good at what they do. They are extraordinarily effective at managing their stock and keeping prices down as low as they possibly can. Because of this, mom and pop shops can't compete with Wal-Mart. They're simply not nearly as effectient. And while many a people complain "Wal-Mart is destroying many of the businesses in our area, this is morally wrong and they should not be able to do it" the same people usually would rather pay $3 for a tool at Wal-Mart than $7 for it at a local mom and pops store. Not to mention Wal-Mart really is "one stop shopping," so you save both time and money and have access to a larger selection.

While we're on the topic of Wal-Mart, I just noticed today that in the swamp of all places people talked about my first blog post in this series. http://www.cardrunners.com/cr_forums/showthread.php?175811-Awesomeness-via-Janda The statement some people had a problem with was "If you are making $8 an hour, chances are your time is worth around $8 an hour." People try to bullshit economics a lot and make it out to be more complicated than it is, but fundamentally supply and demand is going to be what determines someone's wage. If you are doing a job that I can hire someone else to do for $8 an hour, then that is what your time is worth. People often get this confused and think "Wait a second, if my employer makes $30/hr for every hour I work, then my time must be worth more because every hour I work profits him $22/hr!" No, that's not true, because he could just replace you with someone else for $8/hr. He has found a way to make money (which likely requires either capital or a skill set otherwise he'd have already lost his profits to competition), and the economy must more or less work this way to be efficient. This is what has happened with wages at Wal-Mart. $8/hr might be a kickass amount of money if you are 17 (1 shift buys pizzas and a video game)and a very small amount of money if you are a 39 year old single mom having to pay for food, rent, and clothing, but if both have the same skill and are easily replaceable their time is worth $8/hr (it's actually worth less if the wage is that high due to their being a minimum wage, but we won't go there).

What do both the mom and pop shop owner and the union man have in common? Both of them have no real marketable skill set and as soon as competition comes' a knockin' they are out of luck. For union workers, companies saw opportunity overseas and moved their factories to where labor is cheap. Wal-Mart lowered the prices for everyone and gave people access to more products, but put mom and pop shots out of business. In fact, both mom and pop shop owners and union factory workers likely now have jobs at Wal-Mart (Wal-Mart has approximately 2.2 million employees).

People in general get very, very comfortable with thinking "The way things have always been are the way things will always be." This was especially easy for the baby boomer generation after WWII, since America was pretty much the only superpower economy still completely intact which made high paying factory jobs very easy to obtain. The most extreme example of globalization is the internet, since now information can now be sent freely and instantly anywhere in the world. The barriers that used to protect American workers and business owners with few skills no longer exist. You now aren't just competing with Americans but you are competing with the entire world.

Quite simply, Americans are having a very hard time comprehending there's no magic pill (aka college) to success and wealth. We've been taught to believe this is the case, and this is equally clear whether you look at data regarding the graduating classes of lawyers or if you go to a high school graduation where you see parents freaking out in celebration that their kid is graduating high school with a 2.9 GPA and is going to go to college. It now is going to start taking hard work and talent because you are now competing with the rest of the world. The fact that American students are now studying 50% less than they used to in the 1960's (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/opinion/05herbert.html) shows just how ignorant the average 18-23 year old is, and most are not going to realize this until they are $25k+ in debt with no useful skill set in a nation that is $15.5 trillion+ in debt.

This one hits especially close to home to me because I'm currently taking a bunch of classes with a bunch of other pre-meds at UC Berkeley. The city of Berkeley is extremely liberal/idealistic as are young people who haven't yet fully grasped the concept of "resources are scarce," so when you combine them both you can only imagine. I've been told at point blank "I can't believe you want to be a doctor and don't think everyone should have access to free and unlimited health care," and this gets quite annoying since I actually donate money (shout out to Kiva and Smile Train) and I think I realize how fortunate I've been, but it seems like the people who do the most complaining also not usually get much done.
I haven't spent a ton of time analyzing the data and potential effects of universal health care. In my opinion, it's likely a textbook example of a topic where I could manipulate the data however I wanted to. If I worked for insurance companies who wanted everything to stay the same, I'm sure I could fund a bunch of studies and do some research on the internet to make universal health care seem awful. If a senator hired me to try to lobby for universal health care, I'm sure I could find data and studies which make it seem awesome. I have no doubt that it's not that hard to find a study to support your point of view on this, so while I have researched it a bit I'm just going to focus on the most important aspects of it.

1. When we use modern medical technology, we are usually keeping old people alive when they are NOT productive. This means in general we spend the most money on society's least productive members who have no chance at ever becoming productive.

2. Economies of scale in the healthcare industry don't seem particularly realistic. You cannot mass produce doctors the way you can mass produce a car, so anytime I'm told "universal health care will save money!" I'm extremely skeptical. I fully believe there are ways to make healthcare cheaper, but I don't think it's some mass production miracle.

3. Americans are obese, and obese people cost a lot of money to keep healthy. Diabetes paitients are EXTREMELY expensive to take care of, and Americans are getting diabetes are an insane rate (1/3 children born after year 2000 in the USA are estimated to get diabetes). Americans eat terribly here and their health suffers for it, and once they become sick they expect others to pay for it once health insurance gets expensive.
This may be my biggest pet peeve. Americans don't seem to understand that health insurance is not like a gym membership. You can say "Man, I'm out of shape, better join the gym and get in shape now!" and pay a normal gym membership fee. You cannot say "Man, I'm very sick, better get some health insurance so I can get healthy now!" They are nothing alike, and the willingness of Americans to get incredibly unhealthy by their diets and THEN expect to get help shows just how out of whack our culture is in this regard.

4. The government, in general, is extremely wasteful and sucks at just about everything it does because there is rarely any competition and rarely severe consequences for failure. Competition is great as it forces people to improve in order to remain competitive. When the government screws up, the taxpayers are the ones that end up paying so the person who messed up rarely faces any real consequences. While there are many problems we need government intervention on, it's ridiculous to think the government will be effective at running a trillion dollar industry like health care.


I think people in general don't understand resources are limited and once you change people's incentives they act differently. For example, unemployment insurance strongly encourages people to wait longer to get a job. My friend literally just told me last week "I recently learned I will make more money if I go on unemployment then keep my job." These incentives STRONGLY influence the way people act.When it comes to life and death situations, for example, such as "who gets this incredibly expensive treatment?" this problem is much, much worse. The same people who think "life is priceless and everyone deserves free medical treatment" often are the same people who smoke, are fat, don't work hard so they can afford health insurance, and don't donate any money to the 95%+ of the world less fortunate than them. They believe food somehow isn't a fundamental right to people in America and other countries, or the right to surgery with a cleft lip in other countries (it's $250 for the surgery and it literally changes someone's life), yet in America everyone deserves the right to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment if they need it to live.
Quite simply, we can't sustain this. We're not a rich enough nation to provide free and unlimited health care to everyone, and people don't understand this. We also can't change people's incentives and expect them not to act differently. A LOT of the reason people in America get sick is because they smoke, they're fat, they don't move, etc. Do you really think free health care is the one aspect of life where changing people's incentives won't change the way they act? Of course not. People will be less likely to smoke if they know they'll simply die when they get lung cancer and can't afford treatment, and they'll be less likely to be overweight if they know they have to pay more money for health insurance based on their BMI or if they don't have it but have health problems (likely if they're obese) they're out of luck. In non-super rich nations people tend to have a much better grasp of the fact that actions have consequences, and unfortunately, it seems like we're going to have to learn it the hard way once our government gets us in enough debt that people stop feeling confident the government will be able to pay it back.
The baby boomer generation is about to get really old soon and feel entitled to free and unlimited health care. This technology is extremely expensive and access to doctors and nurses is extremely expensive, so there is no way to really keep this cost low without destroying the incentives of researchers to develop new technologies. This is going to happen while young people are pissed off they live in a country with a bunch of debt they didn't create as they are getting into MORE debt and can't get jobs. If our government got itself into over a year's GDP in debt after being a huge economic superpower, how can we expect to not go completely broke when this nightmare begins to happen (if it hasn't already) in a couple years? Not to mention reason #3, which I'll get to in a few days...

As the title indicated, I think things are going to get very bad in America relatively soon. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm planning on using a bunch of common sense/theory and a bit of data to show why I think everyone should be extremely concerned. Like most people, I've been told an incredibly lot of incorrect information in my life time and was never taught to think in terms of probabilities. I've since learned most of the "wisdom" passed down to me from my elders just consists of people telling me their own personal experiences and thinking that what happened to them will likely happen to everyone else. People assume everything will be as it has been in the past, and people hate it when someone goes against the grain and tells them information they don't want to hear about bad times to come like they've never experienced before. A classic example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2I0QN-FYkpw

The education bubble is occurring right now due to several reasons. The first is tuition has increased drastically over the last 20-30 years, so now people are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to go to college whereas in the past they were only paying a few thousand. http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Education/education_sm.jpg In the past, it simply wasn't possible to rack up a huge amount of debt from college like is now. Classes were very cheap so getting an education posed no major risk to your long term financial stability. Now, it is easily possible to rack up $100k+ debt from undergraduate school and another $100k+ from graduate school/law school. This is going to cause a huge problem for several reasons, the first of which is the job market as a whole is incredibly bleak. Since one can't declare bankruptcy on student loans, this means people are going to get stuck with this huge amount of debt for a very long period of time. Law school is a great example of this where people are regularly graduating with 200k+ in debt and have no way of getting a legal job to pay it back. http://www.elsblog.org/.a/6a00d83451b58069e2014e86a0d416970d-450wi. All this money is owed to the government which students can't pay, and even if it can't be legally discharged, you can't bleed a rock.

Another huge problem is since the government made it very easy to obtain student loans and brainwashed people with the idea that "college debt is good debt and you can't make a bad investment in education" is we have all these students who aren't very intelligent getting useless degrees. I've more or less heard the following several times: "Are you too lazy and/or lack the intelligence to do math? No problem, become a political science major! Do what you enjoy and the jobs will come! If you like art history, you should totally major in art history, people will see you graduated from UC Berkeley and know you're smart and want to hire you no matter what!" Sorry, that's not how it works. I don't blame the 18-20 year olds who are being told this incorrect information since they're too young and gullible, but if you aren't intelligent enough to get a useful major, you shouldn't be going to college unless it's very, very cheap (and even then likely not). The real world doesn't care if you like art history, that's a hobby, not a job. We now find ourselves when unintelligent people hold useless degrees and a lot of debt. Is it really difficult to speculate whether it will ever get paid back, and if it doesn't and it's funded on federal loans, who ultimately ends up paying the bill?

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, the reason this will cause a huge problem is Americans have a huge sense of entitlement. Old people want access to incredibly expensive medical technology to keep them alive even though they aren't productive anymore and never produced enough to pay for it. Many poor people live much better than people did 100 years ago or many really poor people around the world live, but still feel abused and that they deserve more. They don't understand if they can only get a job for $8/hr, their time is likely (but not always) only worth $8/hr. The middle class (and even the rich) feel their taxes are way too high and they give way too much and get too little. In other words, every single socioeconomic and/or age group in this country seems to think they are entitled to more, and right now we're spending way, way more than is sustainable despite the fact people want MOAR.

Young people in America share this sense of entitlement, but they are often infuriated they are in debt for a few reasons. The first is the government is now unable to help them because the baby boomer generation has gotten us into so much debt. This means they are paying taxes for things like Medicare they'll likely never get to use. In addition, many kids (and they are kids) agreed to take on this debt before they had any idea what was going on. You can literally rack up $100k+ in student loan debt before you are allowed to legally drink alcohol. Let that sink in for one minute- the government thinks teenagers are intelligent and responsible enough to make financial decisions which are able to impact them for the rest of their life BEFORE they are intelligent and mature enough to have a beer with some friends. Something is very, very wrong here.

I consider myself a very honorable person. I would never consider taking out loans that I did not think I could pay back and if I were in debt I would work very, very hard to pay back the debt. But honestly, I can imagine myself being fed an incredibly lot of incorrect information (law schools are very, very guilty of this) at a very young age and really resenting my debt, to the point where I would feel I shouldn't have to pay it. My thought process was so weak when I was 18-20 compared to now at 25, and the entire higher education system seems to be aware of the fact that teenagers are stupid (shocker!) and has no problem taking advantage of it. I have a problem with people taking advantage of people who don't have a fair fighting chance, and I'm pretty sure it's not that hard to manipulate and trick some 18-20 year olds to making a terrible life investment. I would feel entitled (there's that magical word again!) to a government bail out since I was too young to realize we were at a higher education bubble, and really, how am I supposed to make the correct decision when I'm 18-20 and everyone around me is telling me to go to college so I can make a bunch of money?

I don't need to be told this is a huge problem waiting to happen. I don't need to be told "work hard now, make money and get a skill set you can't lose now while you still can." I know no one is telling me this because most people haven't experienced it in America since the baby boomers lived for the most part very easy lives (especially compared to the generation before it which experienced some giant wars and the Great Depression). It isn't because people are informed and using common sense and have concluded "there is nothing to worry about." Use common sense and hopefully when things do get really bad you'll find yourself much better off than you would have otherwise been with your head in the sand.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is how I now believe theory ("common sense" might even be a better word) matters more when making assumptions and trying to understand information than actual data in many situations. This is the opposite of what I've always thought and been told, as anyone who studies science is usually told "let data do the talking." In a perfect world, I agree. The problem is the world and the people running it are far from perfect.

There are a few problems with looking at data. The first is studies for the data are usually funded by people with objectives. For example, suppose I represent the wheat industry in the Untied States. It's very reasonable for me to fund a bunch of studies for the health effects of "whole grain wheat," and only publish the ones which show wheat in a favorable light. Once enough data gets out there it becomes dogma. Nutrionalist will confidently believe wheat is healthy, and any data which disagrees with them and says "no wait it's actually bad" will usually be silenced since people don't really like being proven wrong, especially when it will have a negative impact on their career. The general public wanting to eat healthy make the mistake of thinking they have access to a bunch of useful data from experiments, but instead it is extremely filtered data which just reflects the objectives of people funding the studies. They are the ones who suffer.

Another thing which makes data matter less is people usually aren't able to objectively analyze complex and important situations and almost all data must be interpreted. One question I've asked when I found out affirmative action is a HUGE!! factor for getting into medical school is "Why are we assuming over-represented minorities don't just have some natural genetic qualities which make them better suited for medicine? Why are we assuming all races are perfectly equal in every way and if they aren't all equally represented something is wrong? We should just take socio-economic conditions of an applicant into account, who cares about race? That will ultimately favor underrepresented minorities anyways since they have a lower socio-economic background." I approach it in an incredibly friendly manner and anyone that knows me knows #1) I'm not a racist in the sense that I think there is a superior race or people should be treated differently, #2) I don't think whites (I'm white) are the smartest race and I don't really give a shit where they rank. I give a shit about having policies which don't make for the best doctors and make it extremely unfair. You're likely not aware, but if you are an Asian American it is so, so much harder to get into medical school than if you are a Black American.

Since expressing my opinion, I've been called a neo-nazi, white supremist, retard, etc. Since I actually research topics when I'm told I'm wrong, I've since learned I've been told an incredibly lot of incorrect facts, such as "intelligence isn't inherrited" (it is) and "studies have shown you can't show the race of a person through their DNA" (you can) and "studies which test IQ from people with different socioeconomic backgrounds all show people having the same IQ" (they don't and it's not close).

Now let's think about it for a second-- if you were an PhD conducting a study and eventually want a great career and to become a professor, what kind of data are you hoping to find if you research this topic? People are so incredibly sensitive about this issue that if you try to publish anything offensive you will immedietly be attacked. Never mind this stuff actually matters when trying to make public policy, if you say anything other than "all races are genetically identical and everyone farts sunshine and butterflies" you will be attacked. If you were a publisher, what kind of articles do you want to publish? One that says "Hey, studies show that certain races might be over-represented in medical school largely because they are smarter. It has less to do with social inequality than most people think, and instead there just aren't many smart *insert racial group here* students able to compete with the many smart *insert ractial group here* studnets"" Can you imagine how crazy people would go with such conclusions? Or, imagine and article which says "All racial groups are basically identical, and any differences we see are due to differences in socioeconomic status." Which is going to get published? Which will help you advance your career, get tenure, and get more funding?

In other words, data from published studies is usually so incredibly biased in some areas it's borderline useless. I have a lot of faith in researchers to answer questions like "What is the specific heat of liquid mercury in standard temperature and atmosphere?" That can easily be tested for in a controlled environment, the data easily reproduced, and no one really has much of an incentive to lie about it. If the specific heat is slightly different from what molecular orbital theory predicted, who cares? This happens all the time and it doens't mean molecular orbital theories are wrong.

I have very, very little faith in research to answer questions such as "How harmful is fast food?" and "Is race and intelligence linked?" For these questions I think you need to apply a lot more common sense and use a lot more general theory. I've been changing my diet and lifestyle a lot in the last few months, and I'm just noticing how often I'm saying "yeah, but I'm going to just use common sense and think about things in terms of the theory of evolution." I've since gone Paleo and am asking myself "in the context of evolution, does it make sense to think I should eat this or do this?" and it seems to be working out so far.

Theory interest me a lot because I feel like you can easily break it down and assign probabilities. There also aren't experiments or studies which are needed to conduct, so you aren't getting a massive amount of filtration for what is actually ever published. I'm going to be posting my thoughts on some issues in the next few months and really want to challenge myself and anyone who reads this to think "Does this make sense? What is the data saying, and how much can we trust the data? Does it agree with other generally established theories we know of (such as diet in the context of evolution)." I pretty much love theory in general and I think we can use it to solve problems way beyond poker, I just think people just aren't stopping and actually thinking enough right now.