Originally Posted by
redietz
Well, I'll point to the obvious reasons.
Most AP's are not blackjack players, so lets start from there. They are primarily non-team folks who use self-contained expertise and discipline to literally grind out a living hour to hour, day to day. They work mostly in isolation versus the casino, so not much reliance on anyone else. This fosters the illusion of "your fate is in your hands" mentality, at least until they hit a mega-variance stretch. Most of their lives are spent in the "self-made man" mode. The individual hands of vp or machine play have variance, but usually not enough to create stretches where doing all of the right things for a year is going to lead to a negative year. Blackjack players, because they spread, and because they are backed off regularly, probably feel more of the "my fate is not entirely in my hands" gestalt in which they operate.
Further along the line are poker players. Now you get all of this crap about "everybody gets the same hands lifetime, so it all comes down to skill," but realistically, that's not true if you're playing no limit hold 'em or play in tournaments. You can kind of keep the "my fate is in my own hands" gestalt if you're always playing limit. But once you're playing no limit or relying on tournament play for income, then a handful of actual hands determine your week or your month or your year. And you can do literally everything right all the time ((as Chris Ferguson said, "I can be beaten, but I can't be outplayed") and walk away with a losing month or a losing year. So your fate in those few "terror" hands amidst the boredom determines your financial fate. It's the nature of a game with no limit rules, the continual possibility of collusion, and escalating tournament stakes. Players "do the right thing" all the time and find themselves losing.
The lesson, then, is that your fate is NOT in your own hands a great deal of the time, and all the self-made excellence in the world guarantees nothing.
And that is where conservatives and progressives part ways -- because conservatives believe in the myth that they are where they deserve to be on merit, and they give less weight to context. Progressives understand that context dictates more than the culture cares to admit. Poker players are always slammed in the face with context, because perfect play never yields perfect results.
For the record, if you examine the social science literature, you will find that human beings almost always OVERestimate the control they they have in all kinds of situations. We are hard wired to believe we have control of things when we do not.