On John Lannan and demoting the inferior player

Much has been made about how John Lannan is the highest-paid player to be optioned to the minor leagues before the season. His $5 million contract heads to Syracuse, while minimum-wager Ross Detwiler stays with the Nationals big club.

The contracts of both players are sunk costs, so they lose the same amount of money regardless of how the roster is arranged. If the big earner isn't among the best players, there's no reason to bring him up.

The Giants, meanwhile, have been going back and forth with their own horrible contract in Barry Zito, who is in the midst of his $126 million deal. They left him off the 2010 playoff roster and sent him to extended spring training this year, but he's coming back to the Majors in a few days.

General managers face some adverse incentives that often lead them to hold onto big money guys or first-round draft picks too long. Letting go of these guys is akin to admitting that they made a mistake.

Why Do People Play Cards More Aggressively Online?

I am a big fan of two rather different card games. Spades is a partner game that involves bidding, trumping, and taking tricks, while Texas hold 'em is a game of betting and shared board cards. Yet they have something in common: people play both a lot more aggressively online than they do in person.

In live tournament poker, it's usually two players to the flop and only rarely three. Many pots go to the lone raiser before the flop uncontested. Online players are much looser, and pots involving four players are more common. Online poker is also home to more "calling stations," or players who can't be bluffed off a marginal hand.

In spades, each player begins with 13 cards, so there are 13 tricks to be had in each hand. Online play is full of 12 and 13 bids, which can net players the most points but also put them in the most danger of being set. Live play, in contrast, has a greater share of 9 and 10 bids, where making the bid is safer and the game becomes an art form of avoiding bags.

The tendencies of online players are generally losing propositions. Conservative poker players rarely play more than 10 to 15% of their starting hands; play many more than this without an extremely solid post-flop strategy is asking for trouble. And players who routinely stretch their bids can be goaded into getting set if the other team underbids.

Perhaps online players aren't as skilled or aren't paying as close attention as live players. In poker, there's often much less on the line: players can enter online tournaments for a few dollars, while the buy-in for a live event is often around $100. So reckless play doesn't quite cost as much.

However, I would argue that to some extent, we all play more impulsively online, because of the web's anonymity.

In poker, there are certain situations where the pot odds dictate that you should call a bet on the river with just an ace high. This is much easier to do if you can hide behind a screen name than if you have to sit at a table full of people laughing at you after the hand and saying, "You called with ... what?!?"

In spades, I'll attempt a more borderline nil when paired with an anonymous stranger than I would with a friend I play with regularly. If it doesn't work out online, I can just leave the table in disgust with no real consequences, but in person, I might have to deal with a frustrated partner for the rest of the game.

A Fun Spades Endgame

This example is based off a play that one of my opponents made at a recent match. Suppose that your team is winning 499-341. You are one point away from winning, but also one bag away from going back 100 points.

The bids are:

Your partner: Nil
Opponent to your left: 5
You: ??
Opponent to your right: ??

Regardless of what cards you have, you should bid ... 9! You're almost certain to be set, of course, but with a successful nil your team will net 10 points for the hand and win without the risk of getting any bags. If you have a competent partner, she would only nil in this situation if it was pretty safe, given that she's first to act and that your team is well ahead. You can now focus on covering the nil without having to worry about how many tricks you take.

But J.K. Rowling DOES Have a Price ...

She wouldn't allow someone to pay her to have their child's name in her Harry Potter series, according to the Financial Times.

I would argue that she does have a price, but none of us has enough money. But imagine if Bill Gates wanted the above transaction and offered Rowling a cool $1 billion. Even if more money has no marginal value for her personally given her vast wealth, a billion dollars could do an immense amount of good for the charities of her choice. It would be impossible to deny the world so much good for something so trivial.

But she, like anyone else, probably wouldn't be able to tell you her price ahead of time, until the money is actually on the table.

Distinctions

I came across two things today that have challenged my mental shortcuts and made me think about what people are really saying.

At work, a vice president gave a presentation about listening to other people's perspectives. He gave the example of someone arguing that a given model won't work. This could mean that they don't think our systems can handle the amount of data, bandwidth, and storage required to the run model. Or it could mean that while the model would be technically feasible, it would be statistically invalid or misleading. Or it could mean something else entirely. Finding out what this person is really saying will help you convince them of your point of view, or convince yourself of theirs.

Just now, the heralded literature that is "South Park and Philosophy" pointed out to me that there's two ways to interpret the phrase "child abduction is not funny." One could be that it "fails as humor," in the same way that Cartman believes Family Guy's endless cutaways do. Another is that it's morally apprehensible to laugh at the subject.

Prediction Markets in the World Ending

I loved this quote from the Post story about the nuts who think the world is ending May 21. (Wasn't it supposed to be 2012?)

Another man was so perturbed by the May 21 message that he brought over a woman he found on the street who needed money. He asked whether the Camping followers would give her some cash, because there was no need for them to keep money with the world ending. They did not.

If you want me to take your doomsday prediction seriously, you should be willing to put money behind it.

I'm reminded of GMU professor Alex Tabbarok's paper about Pascal's wager, which boils down to there being a small-but-nonzero chance that your getting into heaven depends on giving all of your money to Tabbarok, which, he argues, you should do just in case.

The Economics of "Snakes on a Plane"

I really hope someone Googles that some day and I'm the first hit. Take that, Demand Media!

I just read 50 or so painstaking pages of Bryan Caplan's new book Selfish Reason to Have More Kids, where he goes over seemingly every twins-separated-at-birth study ever conducted and argues rather exhaustively yet convincingly that nature matters a lot more than nurture in terms of how a child develops.

I am five minutes into watching "Snakes on a Plane." In this scene, the dude in the picture above has just said the following to another guy who's tied up in front of him:

I'll make sure to tell your son
all about it.
The reason he gets to grow up without a father
is because of how goddamn noble he was.
Then again, I was raised by a single mom and... (he takes a swing at the guy with a baseball bat, spewing blood everywhere)
I didn't turn out so bad, huh? Whoo!

And my first reaction was: "That probably had a small or zero statistical effect on your upbringing! It's all genetic!"

Yes, the master's degree in econ was totally worth it.