Bill’s “Logic.” Pocket Games
No, actually, I’m still right. I don’t usually make Pocket Games statements early in a discussion like “I’m right” or “you’re wrong” because I happen to think that they’re too arrogant to use when there’s still a decent chance that the issue is just a misunderstanding. But given that the topic under discussion (what I wrote the original blog post about) is how much time – and at what limits – I would have to spend to reach my current level of income… Well, I have a leg up on you, Bill.
Anyway, let me try to explain this again: I didn’t just dream up the conclusion that “wow, playing poker for a living is hard” and then try to justify why I had arrived at it. No, I did what most people do when they want to determine if something is worth the effort; they compare it to the alternative. Using my regular job as a bench-mark, I can deduce that while putting in the same amount of hours, I will almost certainly make less money than I do today.
What you’re saying, Bill, is that comparing my current job with a career as a professional poker player, is “faulty logic” because they’re two different beasts, if I understand you correctly. I need to compare it to some other entrepreneur job in order to get a fair comparison. But a fair comparison to WHAT?
“You’re going to get all sorts of wrong conclusions about that because comparing playing professional poker to a 40 hour a week job is like comparing apples to oranges” says Bill. What wrong conclusions are those? The only conclusions I arrived at is one that he apparently agrees with, so he’s going to have to give me examples here.
If I were at a point in my life where I needed to decide if I was going to make a career change, I have to look at a whole bunch of criteria for making the switch. One is how it will affect my level of income, as compared to the number of hours I put in. See (and I pointed this out in my second post on the matter), I get paid overtime. If you’re telling me I should aim at working 70 hour weeks, not 40, then the comparison I have to make is how much money I can make in 70 hours at my regular job as compared to 70 hours of poker. But that’s not necessary. If I make more money from 40 hours at my regular job, I’ll make more money from 70 hours at my regular job. They’re linear. In fact, I could have looked at just a single hour and deduced the same conclusion from it and not even mentioned the 40 hours per week (which seems to be what irks Bill), but since most people are used to thinking in terms of “dollars per week” or “dollars per month” it seemed fitting to use that standard.
Enough about the dollars, though. The observant reader will have noticed my quotation marks around the “faulty logic” phrase. Let me break this down in three statements:
* C: Poker is a hard way to make a living.
* A: (Me) My job is the bench-mark for comparison.
* B: (Bill) A 70-hour job is the bench-mark for comparison.
What Bill is saying is: “Because B implies C, A must not imply C. ” I hope some of the people reading this will appreciate the humoristic irony of him claiming that I’m the one with the faulty logic, heh. The fact that he disagrees with the criteria I chose has nothing to do with logic, although “your logic is flawed” is such a common phrase in discussion nowadays that I suspect people just use it to mean “you’re stupid!”
Let me end by stating this again: The original post, where Bill thinks I’m “wrong,” was me making a comparison to my current job to illustrate why switching to full-time poker will almost certainly not be a financially viable option to me. This conclusion is correct regardless of whether or not I “should” be comparing it to a 70 hour-a-week job. Which I shouldn’t, by the way, because I “should” be comparing alternatives to the current situation, as opposed to “I’m pondering playing poker, will it be worth if it I compare it to being a Chinese factory worker?” or “is grinding it out at $1/$2 better or worse than being the queen of England?”
0
