Outreach to poker players has an advantage over outreach to athletes, in that i) intelligence is a central requirement of being a good poker player, whereas it’s only a secondary requirement of being a good sportsperson in general, ii) thinking about expected values and rationality is a central component of the way poker is played. Whereas it’s only a medium-sized part of how sports in-general are played.
Edit: a lot of people seem to have been offended by this line of reasoning. But it’s unavoidably true: people who calculate expected values and engage in meta-reasoning for their day job will, on average, be vastly more interested in philosophical questions related to impact evaluation, and better equipped to solve difficult societal problems, than those who don’t.
Maybe poker players are richer, relative to how rare their skill is, due to the fact that their sport is played with money. I imagine a larger fraction of poker players are pro than tennis players, at least.
However, athletes are more often well-known. So maybe it makes sense for athletes to mostly focus on raising funds, running for office, things that use things other than just money.
Still, it’s a cool idea—interested to see how it develops!
Hi all, thought I’d jump in here with a few comments.
I think Ryan brings up a fair point in that the thought patterns of poker players may be MORE naturally aligned with EA than other sports. I do, however, think that pro athletes are more focused on optimisation and potential shortcuts than the average person, given how short sport careers are and how hugely impactful a good shortcut/efficiency can be on career earnings. The focus is always on ‘better’, and I think I can use a narrative along those lines to help bring other athletes into alignment with EA principles.
Also, there is already an EA charity in the poker space, REG, who do a great job. So my question to myself some months ago was where could I make the most marginal impact given my skillset and network? I concluded that I have a very rare ‘in’ with pro athletes given that I can approach them from the same level rather than with manager-speak. I think this translates across codes, and have already had some buy-in from athletes in other sports than my own.
Ultimately the biggest snowball will be made with the buy-in of fans, but I also think this is a strength of the area—a lot of people seem to be strongly influenced by the opinions and actions of their sporting heroes. More influenced than makes sense, in my opinion, but this is a huge lever nonetheless. So regardless of whether the actual donation power of athletes is relatively small, I think the influence that athletes have with their followers could make up for that.
I wasn’t personally offended by Ryan’s comments and welcome any pushback or feedback the community has. I think it’s hugely useful and interesting.
I think the optimization mentality is a really big deal. There’s a reason the deliberate practice literature focused on the sports and arts. To the extent that this is translatable to other endeavors (as you and jsteinhardt alludes to), this can be a really big deal for optimization endeavors in EA.
I think this translates across codes
What does “code” mean in this context? Different language codes spoken among different sportspeople?
Ultimately the biggest snowball will be made with the buy-in of fans, but I also think this is a strength of the area—a lot of people seem to be strongly influenced by the opinions and actions of their sporting heroes. More influenced than makes sense, in my opinion, but this is a huge lever nonetheless
I think this makes a lot of sense. As Ryan and others have mentions, there might also be non-monetary EA goals that are useful as well, for example policy goals that are more cosmopolitan and future-oriented, or inspiring/mentoring future generations of researchers and policymakers.
By ‘code’ I mean sport. I’ve spoken to athletes from around 8 different sports thus far and have generally seen a lot of interest. But the big challenge is to go from hearing ‘that’s a cool idea’ to ‘how can I donate’.
I agree that inspiration and mentorship could both be huge, and I would also say that they begin from the same point of communication and education in the athlete community. The athletes can’t pass on what they don’t yet know.
Those who downvoted this: how do you think we’re supposed to make good strategic decisions without having a forthright discussion of the pros and cons of different approaches? See others’ much harsher versions of this argument!
I think the issue with your comment was that someone said “I want to do some good, can anyone help me?” and your response reads as”oh, well, you and your type don’t seem as smart or important as another group of people” which seemed needlessly rude to me. I say it was needless because, pace your follow up comment, there was no strategic decision to make; it wasn’t as if the decision was to help fundraise from athletes or poker places, but just a request for assistance relevant to the former group.
Hey Ryan, I didn’t downvote; but was somewhat annoyed after the first paragraph. I don’t have anything against the second and the third; I actually like them especially the third one.
Intuitively, I didn’t like your first reaction because it feels too stereotypical: “athletes are dumb.” Also, your argument presupposes that high intelligence is needed to engage/understand EA ideas, which feels a bit cringy [as it is sort of self-praising].
I think these considerations might be valid, but they don’t feel decisive. [I think they would be fine as a part of a larger discussion about pros/cons or how to do outreach to athletes better. Also, lately, I become much more confused about good conversational norms…]
OK, that’s interesting, but it’s not what said: that brains do help with being a good sportsperson—they’re just not a predominant feature, as in poker!
Re intelligence, well, no it’s not necessary for engaging with EA (I didn’t say it was). But it obviously helps—a lot of EA-fans are at top universities, and smarts also help with figuring out how to do good.
Is the poker-vs-sport difference decisive? Well, poker is an extremely frustrating and difficult game/sport. A top pro-player can lose money for months, due to the swings involved. It’s much easier than in sport to go on tilt. Dealing with such uncertainty is exactly the sort of thing that can help with thinking impassively about uncertain philanthropic interventions. So maybe!
I’d push back on the last paragraph here—granted, some sports are salary based and relatively financially secure from year to year. Tennis and many other individual sports are the opposite and purely based on how many matches you win. Given the huge expenses inherent in flying to tournaments and hiring coaches, many weeks are break-even or losses, even at the highest level. If dealing with this sort of uncertainty helps with EA alignment then it bodes well for approaching athletes from many individual sports.
Makes sense! How people deal with the uncertainty could also be informative. If they talk about calculating the expected value (in earnings) of a tournament, or expected points won from a shot, or get excited about sport statisticians’ work generally—then that would be extra-encouraging.
I personally wouldn’t pay that much attention to the particular language people use—it’s more highly correlated with their local culture than with abilities or interests. I’d personally be extra excited to talk to someone with a strong track record of handling uncertainty well who had a completely different vocabulary than me, although I’d also expect it to take more effort to get to the payoff.
Sure, I think your views are much more nuanced (sorry, I didn’t make it clear). The items I listed are kinda my low-effort impression; in the same mode, I could be tricked into believing the post is written by a mediocre writer when it is actually written by GPT-3). These impressions caused annoyance.
[At this point, I might be overthinking it; forgot how I actually felt.]
I didn’t downvote, but the analysis seems incorrect to me: most pro athletes are highly intelligent, and in terms of single attributes that predict success in subsequent difficult endeavors I can’t think of much better; I’d probably take it over successful startup CEO even. It also seems like the sort of error that’s particularly costly to make for reasons of overall social dynamics and biases.
Good point. I think I’d rather clarify/revise my claims to: 1) pro athletes will be somewhat less interested in EA than poker players, mostly due to different thinking styles, and 2) many/most pro athletes are highly generally capable but their comparative advantage won’t usually be donating tournament winnings or doing research. Something like promoting disarmament, or entering politics could be. But it needs way more thought.
Thanks! 1 seems believable to me, at least for EA as it currently presents. 2 seems believable on average but I’d expect a lot of heterogeneity (I personally know athletes who have gone on to be very good researchers). It also seems like donations are pretty accessible to everyone, as you can piggyback on other people’s research.
Just saw this now and strong-upvoted it; as one of the REG cofounders, I agree with your first point. (I actually kind of disagree with your second point – the poker industry often plays up how rich poker pros actually are, and the poker pros play along, but in reality many aren’t that wealthy as it seems.)
I also didn’t downvote but the first bullet point comes across really badly, and that’s speaking as someone who’s had considerably more success in poker than sport. My guess is that the downvotes are because of that.
Like Mischa, I think it’s easily read as cringy and self congratulatory i.e.
“thanks for trying but I’m not sure you’re smart enough to join our cause.”
If I’d wanted to make that point, I’d probably have gone for something like:
> (probably as the third point) “however, I think that outreach to sportspeople might be much harder than to poker pros. Some EA ideas are quite counterintuitive, and there’s a lot of very similar reasoning in poker/EA, while in general I wouldn’t expect pro sports people to be as familiar with things like expected value reasoning”.
Seperately to why this was downvoted, I think your second bullet point is wrong. I expect that the top few earners in sport are at least an order of magnitude better off than in poker, and the set {pro sportspeople} earns at least three orders of magnitude more in total than {poker pros}.
Yes, the very richest sportspeople have ~$1B to poker players’ ~$0.1B. But the top sportspeople are rarer in their talents because ~100x more people try to play e.g. soccer than poker. Pro sport seems to pays less well than poker for any given level of talent. In order to equal the donations of poker players, you might have to get players who are quite elite and famous, or assemble a group across different sports. Whereas for poker it’s a tight-knit group of unknown nerds—easier to do!
I’m not sure why you’re dividing by the number of people who try to play sport? If you include in your definition of “poker pro” everyone who plays poker, on average they are losing money.
I’d be prepared to bet that, counting “earner” as “someone with positive lifetime earnings”, the nth highest earner in sport is making more than the nth highest earner in poker for all n.
What you divide by just depends what question you’re trying to answer.
I don’t think we really want to know about the total earnings, or the earnings of a player with a particular ranking, as these would assume that you can capture some large fraction, or some top-tier part of the total market. On those measures, “all people” is the best pool to recruit from.
More interesting questions [if you’re trying to raise donations] are things like “what are the average earnings?” or “how well-paid is an individual with a certain level of extraordinariness?”. If you need to be a one-in-a-million soccer player to earn as much as a one-in-a-thousand poker player, then the soccer players are more sparse, more famous, and harder to recruit than equivalently rich poker players.
As a data point, I downvoted the original comment but removed the downvote after reading the edited version, which I think is phrased a lot better.
In cases where a comment is edited after other comments critique it, I wonder if we should gently encourage a norm of having the removed words be crossed out, rather than deleted entirely? It is of course an author’s right to remove anything they no longer endorse, but it can be confusing to see comments refer to material that no longer exists.
I think outreach to some athletes might be easier than you think. As part of them rely on evidence-based advice from their coaches. It is plausible that personal experience will make it easier for them to see value in and relate to GiveWell’s approach to giving.
Further, maybe, attitudes towards evidence-based medicine could be a proxy to guide outreach initially?
Hi Ryan, I think your comment is useful but incorrect as it’s written. Your comment implies that the intelligence or rationality of athletes is a major factor in whether this organisation will be successful. I’ve seen vaguely EA-related outreach to founders, poker players, and people who inherit loads of money. The thing these groups have in common are that they’ve got lots of money to donate that they got all at once, which athletes also have. I don’t think we should get hung up on “intelligence”, rationality or ability to think in bets.
I’ve seen vaguely EA-related outreach to founders, poker players, and people who inherit loads of money. The thing these groups have in common are that they’ve got lots of money to donate that they got all at once, which athletes also have. I don’t think we should get hung up on “intelligence”, rationality or ability to think in bets.
Founders, poker players, heirs, and sportspeople actually have vastly different levels of wealth. Founders have wealth ranging up to >$100B. Heirs up to >$30B. For sportspeople, it’s <$1B, much less on average. For Poker players, it’s <$0.1B. In other words, poker players are not among the biggest funders in EA anymore. Rather, if they are to have a really big impact, it will be by contributing their time and influence. Liv Boeree, for example, is doing a lot of social media, and some others are switching into research roles. In other words, they’re doing things where their intelligence and rationality is front and centre. The amount of funds of a typical pro athlete may be similar or less than that of these top poker players. So I would expect that the intelligence or rationality of athletes will be a major factor in their impact.
My intuition was that pro athletes have more “cognitive horsepower” than average (and are much more able/willing to work hard, which also seems like a really valuable trait). I searched “average iq of athletes” on Google scholar and found this meta-analysis from 2019 that looks at cognitive function of pro-athletes vs. non‐elite athletes, seemingly supporting this. From the abstract:
An extraordinary physiological capacity combined with remarkable motor control, perception, and cognitive functioning is crucial for high performance in sports. [...] Moreover, a growing area of research evolved in the recent past that is particularly concerned with the basic cognitive functions by means of neurocognitive tests in experts and elite athletes. The aim of this meta‐analysis (k = 19) is to quantify differences among experts and nonexperts as well as elite athletes and non‐elite athletes. In addition, it aims to assemble and compare previous research and analyze possible differences in cognitive functions depending on age, skill level, and used cognitive tasks. Overall, the mean effect size was small to medium (r = 0.22), indicating superior cognitive functions in experts and elite athletes.
It seems likely that pro athletes are more intelligent than average, but I’d be very surprised if they were as intelligent as pro poker players on average.
Interesting idea! A few reactions:
Outreach to poker players has an advantage over outreach to athletes, in that i) intelligence is a central requirement of being a good poker player, whereas it’s only a secondary requirement of being a good sportsperson in general, ii) thinking about expected values and rationality is a central component of the way poker is played. Whereas it’s only a medium-sized part of how sports in-general are played.
Edit: a lot of people seem to have been offended by this line of reasoning. But it’s unavoidably true: people who calculate expected values and engage in meta-reasoning for their day job will, on average, be vastly more interested in philosophical questions related to impact evaluation, and better equipped to solve difficult societal problems, than those who don’t.
Maybe poker players are richer, relative to how rare their skill is, due to the fact that their sport is played with money. I imagine a larger fraction of poker players are pro than tennis players, at least.
However, athletes are more often well-known. So maybe it makes sense for athletes to mostly focus on raising funds, running for office, things that use things other than just money.
Still, it’s a cool idea—interested to see how it develops!
Hi all, thought I’d jump in here with a few comments.
I think Ryan brings up a fair point in that the thought patterns of poker players may be MORE naturally aligned with EA than other sports. I do, however, think that pro athletes are more focused on optimisation and potential shortcuts than the average person, given how short sport careers are and how hugely impactful a good shortcut/efficiency can be on career earnings. The focus is always on ‘better’, and I think I can use a narrative along those lines to help bring other athletes into alignment with EA principles.
Also, there is already an EA charity in the poker space, REG, who do a great job. So my question to myself some months ago was where could I make the most marginal impact given my skillset and network? I concluded that I have a very rare ‘in’ with pro athletes given that I can approach them from the same level rather than with manager-speak. I think this translates across codes, and have already had some buy-in from athletes in other sports than my own.
Ultimately the biggest snowball will be made with the buy-in of fans, but I also think this is a strength of the area—a lot of people seem to be strongly influenced by the opinions and actions of their sporting heroes. More influenced than makes sense, in my opinion, but this is a huge lever nonetheless. So regardless of whether the actual donation power of athletes is relatively small, I think the influence that athletes have with their followers could make up for that.
I wasn’t personally offended by Ryan’s comments and welcome any pushback or feedback the community has. I think it’s hugely useful and interesting.
I think the optimization mentality is a really big deal. There’s a reason the deliberate practice literature focused on the sports and arts. To the extent that this is translatable to other endeavors (as you and jsteinhardt alludes to), this can be a really big deal for optimization endeavors in EA.
What does “code” mean in this context? Different language codes spoken among different sportspeople?
I think this makes a lot of sense. As Ryan and others have mentions, there might also be non-monetary EA goals that are useful as well, for example policy goals that are more cosmopolitan and future-oriented, or inspiring/mentoring future generations of researchers and policymakers.
Hi Linch,
By ‘code’ I mean sport. I’ve spoken to athletes from around 8 different sports thus far and have generally seen a lot of interest. But the big challenge is to go from hearing ‘that’s a cool idea’ to ‘how can I donate’.
I agree that inspiration and mentorship could both be huge, and I would also say that they begin from the same point of communication and education in the athlete community. The athletes can’t pass on what they don’t yet know.
Those who downvoted this: how do you think we’re supposed to make good strategic decisions without having a forthright discussion of the pros and cons of different approaches? See others’ much harsher versions of this argument!
I think the issue with your comment was that someone said “I want to do some good, can anyone help me?” and your response reads as”oh, well, you and your type don’t seem as smart or important as another group of people” which seemed needlessly rude to me. I say it was needless because, pace your follow up comment, there was no strategic decision to make; it wasn’t as if the decision was to help fundraise from athletes or poker places, but just a request for assistance relevant to the former group.
Hey Ryan, I didn’t downvote; but was somewhat annoyed after the first paragraph. I don’t have anything against the second and the third; I actually like them especially the third one.
Intuitively, I didn’t like your first reaction because it feels too stereotypical: “athletes are dumb.” Also, your argument presupposes that high intelligence is needed to engage/understand EA ideas, which feels a bit cringy [as it is sort of self-praising].
I think these considerations might be valid, but they don’t feel decisive. [I think they would be fine as a part of a larger discussion about pros/cons or how to do outreach to athletes better. Also, lately, I become much more confused about good conversational norms…]
OK, that’s interesting, but it’s not what said: that brains do help with being a good sportsperson—they’re just not a predominant feature, as in poker!
Re intelligence, well, no it’s not necessary for engaging with EA (I didn’t say it was). But it obviously helps—a lot of EA-fans are at top universities, and smarts also help with figuring out how to do good.
Is the poker-vs-sport difference decisive? Well, poker is an extremely frustrating and difficult game/sport. A top pro-player can lose money for months, due to the swings involved. It’s much easier than in sport to go on tilt. Dealing with such uncertainty is exactly the sort of thing that can help with thinking impassively about uncertain philanthropic interventions. So maybe!
I’d push back on the last paragraph here—granted, some sports are salary based and relatively financially secure from year to year. Tennis and many other individual sports are the opposite and purely based on how many matches you win. Given the huge expenses inherent in flying to tournaments and hiring coaches, many weeks are break-even or losses, even at the highest level. If dealing with this sort of uncertainty helps with EA alignment then it bodes well for approaching athletes from many individual sports.
Makes sense! How people deal with the uncertainty could also be informative. If they talk about calculating the expected value (in earnings) of a tournament, or expected points won from a shot, or get excited about sport statisticians’ work generally—then that would be extra-encouraging.
I personally wouldn’t pay that much attention to the particular language people use—it’s more highly correlated with their local culture than with abilities or interests. I’d personally be extra excited to talk to someone with a strong track record of handling uncertainty well who had a completely different vocabulary than me, although I’d also expect it to take more effort to get to the payoff.
Sure, I think your views are much more nuanced (sorry, I didn’t make it clear). The items I listed are kinda my low-effort impression; in the same mode, I could be tricked into believing the post is written by a mediocre writer when it is actually written by GPT-3). These impressions caused annoyance.
[At this point, I might be overthinking it; forgot how I actually felt.]
I didn’t downvote, but the analysis seems incorrect to me: most pro athletes are highly intelligent, and in terms of single attributes that predict success in subsequent difficult endeavors I can’t think of much better; I’d probably take it over successful startup CEO even. It also seems like the sort of error that’s particularly costly to make for reasons of overall social dynamics and biases.
Good point. I think I’d rather clarify/revise my claims to: 1) pro athletes will be somewhat less interested in EA than poker players, mostly due to different thinking styles, and 2) many/most pro athletes are highly generally capable but their comparative advantage won’t usually be donating tournament winnings or doing research. Something like promoting disarmament, or entering politics could be. But it needs way more thought.
Thanks! 1 seems believable to me, at least for EA as it currently presents. 2 seems believable on average but I’d expect a lot of heterogeneity (I personally know athletes who have gone on to be very good researchers). It also seems like donations are pretty accessible to everyone, as you can piggyback on other people’s research.
Just saw this now and strong-upvoted it; as one of the REG cofounders, I agree with your first point. (I actually kind of disagree with your second point – the poker industry often plays up how rich poker pros actually are, and the poker pros play along, but in reality many aren’t that wealthy as it seems.)
Despite this, I feel excited about HIA!
I also didn’t downvote but the first bullet point comes across really badly, and that’s speaking as someone who’s had considerably more success in poker than sport. My guess is that the downvotes are because of that.
Is the offensive part that intelligence might be useful, or that poker players might be more intelligent?
Like Mischa, I think it’s easily read as cringy and self congratulatory i.e.
“thanks for trying but I’m not sure you’re smart enough to join our cause.”
If I’d wanted to make that point, I’d probably have gone for something like:
> (probably as the third point) “however, I think that outreach to sportspeople might be much harder than to poker pros. Some EA ideas are quite counterintuitive, and there’s a lot of very similar reasoning in poker/EA, while in general I wouldn’t expect pro sports people to be as familiar with things like expected value reasoning”.
Seperately to why this was downvoted, I think your second bullet point is wrong. I expect that the top few earners in sport are at least an order of magnitude better off than in poker, and the set {pro sportspeople} earns at least three orders of magnitude more in total than {poker pros}.
Yes, the very richest sportspeople have ~$1B to poker players’ ~$0.1B. But the top sportspeople are rarer in their talents because ~100x more people try to play e.g. soccer than poker. Pro sport seems to pays less well than poker for any given level of talent. In order to equal the donations of poker players, you might have to get players who are quite elite and famous, or assemble a group across different sports. Whereas for poker it’s a tight-knit group of unknown nerds—easier to do!
I’m not sure why you’re dividing by the number of people who try to play sport? If you include in your definition of “poker pro” everyone who plays poker, on average they are losing money.
I’d be prepared to bet that, counting “earner” as “someone with positive lifetime earnings”, the nth highest earner in sport is making more than the nth highest earner in poker for all n.
What you divide by just depends what question you’re trying to answer.
I don’t think we really want to know about the total earnings, or the earnings of a player with a particular ranking, as these would assume that you can capture some large fraction, or some top-tier part of the total market. On those measures, “all people” is the best pool to recruit from.
More interesting questions [if you’re trying to raise donations] are things like “what are the average earnings?” or “how well-paid is an individual with a certain level of extraordinariness?”. If you need to be a one-in-a-million soccer player to earn as much as a one-in-a-thousand poker player, then the soccer players are more sparse, more famous, and harder to recruit than equivalently rich poker players.
“If you need to be a one-in-a-million soccer player to earn as much as a one-in-a-thousand poker player”
But you don’t, unless you define “poker player” as “winning poker player” and “soccer player” as “anyone who’s kicked a football”.
As a data point, I downvoted the original comment but removed the downvote after reading the edited version, which I think is phrased a lot better.
In cases where a comment is edited after other comments critique it, I wonder if we should gently encourage a norm of having the removed words be crossed out, rather than deleted entirely? It is of course an author’s right to remove anything they no longer endorse, but it can be confusing to see comments refer to material that no longer exists.
re: your first reaction
I think outreach to some athletes might be easier than you think. As part of them rely on evidence-based advice from their coaches. It is plausible that personal experience will make it easier for them to see value in and relate to GiveWell’s approach to giving.
Further, maybe, attitudes towards evidence-based medicine could be a proxy to guide outreach initially?
Hi Ryan, I think your comment is useful but incorrect as it’s written. Your comment implies that the intelligence or rationality of athletes is a major factor in whether this organisation will be successful. I’ve seen vaguely EA-related outreach to founders, poker players, and people who inherit loads of money. The thing these groups have in common are that they’ve got lots of money to donate that they got all at once, which athletes also have. I don’t think we should get hung up on “intelligence”, rationality or ability to think in bets.
For what it’s worth, I think that EA related outreach to heirs seems much less promising than to founders or pro poker players.
Successful founders are often extremely smart in my experience; I expect pro poker players are also pretty smart on average.
Founders, poker players, heirs, and sportspeople actually have vastly different levels of wealth. Founders have wealth ranging up to >$100B. Heirs up to >$30B. For sportspeople, it’s <$1B, much less on average. For Poker players, it’s <$0.1B. In other words, poker players are not among the biggest funders in EA anymore. Rather, if they are to have a really big impact, it will be by contributing their time and influence. Liv Boeree, for example, is doing a lot of social media, and some others are switching into research roles. In other words, they’re doing things where their intelligence and rationality is front and centre. The amount of funds of a typical pro athlete may be similar or less than that of these top poker players. So I would expect that the intelligence or rationality of athletes will be a major factor in their impact.
My intuition was that pro athletes have more “cognitive horsepower” than average (and are much more able/willing to work hard, which also seems like a really valuable trait). I searched “average iq of athletes” on Google scholar and found this meta-analysis from 2019 that looks at cognitive function of pro-athletes vs. non‐elite athletes, seemingly supporting this. From the abstract:
It seems likely that pro athletes are more intelligent than average, but I’d be very surprised if they were as intelligent as pro poker players on average.
(moved elsewhere)