Here’s Andy Black in 2005 on a British poker talk show: part 1, part 2 (embedding was a no-go).

tlrw; The strategy book he mentions is The Diamond Cutter, which I imagine is based on The Diamond Cutter of Perfect Wisdom.

The Million Dollar Deal is a documentary that followed Black’s first attempt at the WSOP, where he met, befriended, and lost to Stu Ungar before giving up all of his worldly possessions and entering a Buddhist monastery.

Black says that Ungar used to look for something in his opponents to hate, and that was how he got the motivation to destroy them (and perhaps, in the end, himself — that much hate can’t be good for you). Black offers the buddha-dharma not-opposite approach: that it’s just a game (this is harder to believe than one might think).

I’ve added our first-ever banner ad, over on the right over the search bar. If it’s not totally obvious:

1. It’s unpaid.
2. It’s for charity.

This blog started with several strict policies about user metrics, ads, and freedom of speech, but in our almost five years all of those have been modified. This is proper — the buddha-dharma shows that rules cannot skillfully encapsulate reality.

The banner is a reminder of the East African Drought Crisis, which Western nations aside from Canada are not handling skillfully (it’s up in the air if Canada is as well) — not an endorsement of the linked supercharity.

Typically a charity should be analyzed for the amount of money it spends on itself versus the amount it spends on its cause, and, for example, the Oxfam charities are a source of contention (as are all organizations). MSF/DWoB was, last I checked, the best-of-breed non-religious charity in terms of utility.

Still, while I fap around with utilitarianism and math people are starving because, perhaps, Westerners like Winter vacations.

I’m not in a position to donate because I’m a cash-strapped student, but I do have a blog which a couple of people read. Some of you have bought products on our recommendation in past, so I thought I’d put this in front of you all and ask for your consideration.

Sometimes I feel very close to awakened mindfulness, and sometimes I feel very far away.

This morning, over waffles and wonderful coffee — from Lunenburg: The Laughing Whale; slightly fish-scented, the coffee, not the waffles — I was having some difficult feelings and I complained:

I don’t get what’s so great about being in the moment. I’ve been in the moment plenty of times: when I had a headache, a hangover. Have you ever had a breakup or a depression so bad that minutes passed like hours? It doesn’t feel good — it’s not like I was experiencing the moment, it’s more like I was trapped in it.

Jill:

Mindfulness isn’t about feeling good. Expecting it to be something in particular is another trap keeping us in saṃsāra. If you feel pain, sit with it and let it wash over you.

Last night I was watching the “live” coverage of this year’s World Series of Poker (and finished top 0.5% in a small tourney of my own). “Live”, in quotes, because not only is the coverage delayed a half-hour for gameplay reasons, but also because I’ve timeshifted the heck out of it. Anyway.

At one point one of the announcers made a comment that reminded me of the wheel of dharma. A player had just busted and Lon McEachern said:

And the great wheel of poker turns. Hello, welcome to the game, goodbye, thanks for playing.

This, in turn, reminded me of Amy Winehouse with echoes of Heath Ledger. I’ve been vaguely happy for her since I heard of her death, for a reason I can’t quite put my finger on — “fullness” — but anyway, suddenly I was quite sad at the turning of that wheel. It’s exacerbated by the media, but it seems like the death-moment is so fragile and temporary and permanent. One minute here, one gone forever, and the wheel rolls on.

But time is an illusion, another of those saṃsāric traps. I’m beginning to get a better handle on that, the existence of only one, knife-edge moment.

If you never paid attention to Winehouse grab her albums now. I did, they’re fantastic, she was worth the media attention, and her karmic contributions to The Great Mandala are percolating.

☸ Anyway, peace. Love you all. ☸

Martin Seligman is usually considered the founder of positive psychology. In 2004 he gave an introductory talk at TED, where he says positive psychology studies three things:

• pleasure
• engagement
• meaning

Seligman basically says nothing about meaning (but Wikipedia’s Meaning of life is an excellent overview). Engagement is effectively synonymous with flow/wu wei. Pleasure is 50% heritable (which explains why winning the lottery doesn’t make you much happier in the long run) but the other 50% can be changed.

Seligman has both academic and commercial sites with a bunch of questionnaires. The only intervention he talks about for engagement is to restructure unengaging tasks to focus on “character strengths” (although there are others). To increase pleasure there are at least two effective engagements:

• gratitude training (eg: a “good times” journal, writing letters of gratitude)
• mindfulness

Mindfulness is supposedly based on Buddhist meditation, but I think there’s some confusion. As I see it, Buddhist meditation includes two kinds of mindfulness:

• awareness of the present moment external to the self
• meta-consciousness: observing the structure of the self (the “monkey mind”) to transcend the present

The purpose of awareness training in psychology is to increase the pleasure gained and retained from pleasant experiences. When the sense of self is removed to savor an experience, you increase pleasure. When the sense of self is removed in carrying out a task, you increasing engagement. There is a correlation between these but I don’t think positive psychology understands the causal relationship yet.

Neo-classical economics assumes that people are rational agents: given a choice, they will always choose the option that maximizes utility (wealth, happiness, etc). And yet, as with most things in economics, actual observation shows this to be a poor model for reality. Instead of rationality, it turns out that “satisficing” is an excellent model: given a choice, people will choose an option that does a “good enough” job of maximizing utility.

I like to think of satisficing in terms of computational theory: people make choices using an algorithm that yields increasingly accurate answers the more computational resources are devoted to it; but the optimal answer would require huge resources, so a “good enough” answer must suffice.

I believe we not only satisfice when we’re making decisions but also when we implement them. The concept is closely related to “settling”. We constantly decide that what we have readily available is good enough, whether it’s paint colour or a mate.

Life has sparse survival decisions and many inconsequential decisions between essentially interchangable choices. Most of the interesting decisions in life are aesthetic choices and for these we consistently satisfice.

I’ve been wondering lately if satisficing increases stress? Is it frustrating to know that greater effort could achieve a more optimal answer? Do our brains’ decision processes dislike being halted before they complete? Life is a series of aesthetic choices and it pains us to make each one = life is suffering, the First Noble Truth.