The Power of Official Licenses

"A novice stares down at his own two hole cards, while a veteran looks up at the entire poker table."

—— Maxims of the Texas Hold'em community

"You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em."

—— Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

"As long as you still have one chip and a chair, you are not out of the game."

—— Jack Strauss, World Champion of Texas Hold'em

The house is not large, but there is a walkable park nearby; the collection of books is not huge, but you can borrow books from the library; there are some tasks you cannot do on your own, yet you can find tools, tutorials, and people willing to help.

Borrowing the terminology from Texas Hold'em, I would like to call these the "community cards" in life.

The day before yesterday I read an article claiming that AI is so powerful that life feels utterly meaningless. This is a ridiculous idea.

AI has indeed become the most powerful community card of this era. But have you ever seen anyone feel that life is meaningless just because the sun shines too brightly and the Earth is too vast?

There are two fundamental dimensions to understanding "community cards":

On the one hand, even if you do nothing in this era and do not compete with others for wins or losses, you naturally enjoy the benefits brought by this huge community card — just like we freely enjoy sunlight, air, clean water and green trees on street corners, the medical breakthroughs, knowledge equity and life convenience brought by AI will shine into the daily life of every ordinary person like sunlight, forming a pot of chips that everyone can directly access.

On the other hand, if you still want to achieve something at the poker table, there is a common sense in Texas Hold'em: no player will ever be foolish enough to compare the two "private hole cards" in his hand against the five "community cards" on the table. Community cards are not your opponents, but chips that help you form your best hand — the real victory or defeat depends on how you use the two private hole cards in your palm to combine with the five community cards flipped over on the table to make the best possible hand.

However, when this community card today is stronger than ever before, the gameplay at the table has indeed undergone a drastic reshuffle:

What are the daily community cards around us that are as free as sunlight, yet have been ignored by us for years?

Facing the new opportunities spread all over the table, when should you join the game to combine your cards, and when should you fold decisively?

When large models turn countless old skills into zero-threshold community cards, what exactly are the non-takeable "private hole cards" in our hands?

Taking "the power of community cards" as the thinking clue, I wrote down the following 40 notes:

1. Texas Hold'em reminds us that the cards in your hand should be viewed together with the cards on the table.

A standard 52-card deck gives each player two private hole cards at the start, with a total of 1,326 possible combinations (classified into 169 categories by rank and suitedness); the five community cards dealt one after another on the table have 2,598,960 possibilities (after deducting your own two cards, the remaining 50 cards can also form 2,118,760 different community card layouts).

Players need to select the best five out of these seven cards to form their poker hand. A pair of Aces is the strongest starting hand, with a probability of about 0.45% to be dealt. Assuming opponents hold random hands and all players reach showdown, the winning probability of AA in a heads-up match is about 85%; when nine players play together, this figure drops to around 35% (including split pots for ties).

Life has similar parallels. Beyond your family background, physical condition, experience and savings, there are also the era, city, system and technology we live in.

Novice players often fixate on their two private hole cards, while veterans focus on what combinations their hole cards can make with the community cards on the table. However, the rule of five cards against two only applies to the poker table, and we can never calculate what percentage of life is determined by the environment.

2. Sometimes, community cards are so strong that private hole cards temporarily lose their difference.

If the table flips out A, K, Q, J, 10 of the same suit (a royal flush), all players remaining at showdown can directly use these five highest-ranked cards on the table to split the pot evenly — this is called "playing the board" in the rules.

At this moment, holding two Aces in your hand makes no difference at all from holding the universally recognized worst 7 and 2 offsuit.

For life, this is an interesting analogy: some progress of the times will turn conditions that were once only available to a tiny minority into public infrastructure for everyone's daily use.

Also, for certain "super opportunities", as long as you are at the table, you will basically get similar results, which have little to do with how smart or hardworking you are.

3. But the same community card may have completely opposite meanings to different people.

When a new card is flipped on the table, someone completes a straight, while another player's previously leading pair suddenly becomes insufficient.

The same is true for new technologies. It may save you a huge amount of repetitive labor, but it may also make a craft you rely on for a living much cheaper. When discussing opportunities of the times, we must also ask: What exactly can this newly flipped community card combine with what I am currently doing?

To be more precise, the two are like the length and width of a rectangle, whose product gives the total area.

4. The so-called "drawing hand" means placing your hole cards in a position within "the adjacent possible".

You have two hearts in your hand, and two more hearts come out on the flop — you haven't made a flush yet, but among the 47 unknown cards, there are 9 hearts that can help you complete the flush on the next round. In Texas Hold'em, these 9 future community cards that can make your hand are called "Outs".

Stuart Kauffman, a scholar of complex systems, proposed the concept of "The Adjacent Possible". Steven Johnson, a popular science writer, gave an example in his book Where Good Ideas Come From: In the mid-15th century, when Gutenberg developed metal movable type printing in Europe, it was not a sudden epiphany out of thin air, but a combination and transformation of existing technologies such as screw presses, metalworking, oil-based ink and papermaking, forming a usable printing system.

Very often, the task at hand seems to be just one step away from completion (you are just on a draw instead of having a made hand), so there is no need to rush to negate everything. Calculate which external "outs" you are still missing: maybe the cost of computing power will be cut in half, or an open-source component will fill the gap. First push your preparation to the position where "you only need one more community card to make a straight", so that when that card is flipped, you can catch it immediately.

Behind this is a powerful engineering mindset, which the protagonist in my favorite book The Martian used to survive and escape.

5. The "borrowing scenery" technique in Chinese gardens and Japanese dry landscape gardens is a clever way to use community cards.

In the last volume of his work The Craft of Gardens completed in 1631, Ji Cheng of the Ming Dynasty dedicated a special chapter to "borrowing scenery", calling it "the most important element in forest gardens", which is divided into distant borrowing, adjacent borrowing, upward borrowing, downward borrowing, and seasonal borrowing.

The Sōgen Pond at Tenryu-ji Temple in Kyoto borrows the scenery of Mount Arashiyama and Mount Kameyama outside the temple; while at Enkoji Temple in northern Kyoto, gardeners do not plant large trees in the courtyard, but only build a low green hedge to block the nearby messy houses, "framing" Mount Hiei several kilometers away into their own dry landscape garden completely.

When arranging our own lives, we can also think more about what already exists nearby: if we cannot put fitness equipment at home, is there a sports ground nearby? If we do not have an independent study, is there a quiet reading space within a 10-minute walk? There is no need to force rockeries into a narrow room, it is enough to open a window facing the external "borrowed scenery".

6. Thoreau wrote about a kind of enjoyment that does not require you to buy a farm.

In Walden published in 1854, Thoreau talked about how he almost bought the Hollowell farm. The transaction was canceled before the signature, but he felt that he had already received the most beautiful scenery and woods there for free. Even the woodland where he built his cabin by Walden Pond was bought by his friend Emerson. He wrote that as long as he walked through the scenery, the whole landscape belonged to him to appreciate, and the owner of the land was often just a watchman who built the fence for him.

Property rights have their value, and appreciation also has its value. Whether a landscape allows you to stop and take a breath does not entirely depend on whose name is written on the property certificate. Just think about how many seaside villas, their owners spend far less time enjoying the scenery than their nannies or cleaners.

7. Public facilities are originally built to make up for ordinary people's private hole cards.

In 1858, when Olmsted and Vaux designed New York's Central Park, wealthy people in New York were building private estates in the Hudson Valley. This public project employed a large number of workers and moved millions of cubic yards of earth and stone, forming the 843-acre park we see today, so that meadows, trails and lakes no longer only exist behind the private walls of the rich. The West Lake in Hangzhou embodies the same inspiration and wisdom.

When evaluating a place to live, besides looking at the number of square meters indoors, it is also worth checking where you can go when you turn the corner downstairs. The nearby parks, hospitals, public transport and libraries are also part of our daily lives.

8. The "free-rider effect" in economics is a smart way of life in personal life.

Pure public goods in economics usually have two characteristics: first, "non-excludability", it is difficult to exclude people who do not pay from using them; second, "non-rivalry", one person's use will not reduce the share available to others.

Wealthy people spend tens of millions to make the exterior walls of their private mansions full of flowers, or the municipal government invests huge sums of money to build riverside trails. Neighbors who pass by for a walk can enjoy the same visual pleasure and microclimate improvement without spending a penny. The former is enjoying "positive externalities", while the latter reflects the benefit that public facilities can be shared by all.

In commercial games and public governance, free-riding is often regarded as a problem that needs to be prevented. But in personal daily life, legally and frequently consuming the positive externalities of public goods — sunbathing in the street corner park, running on the municipal greenway, watching open courses from top universities — is a shortcut for ordinary people to improve the quality of life without paying maintenance fees.

9. The daily community cards we take for granted were once unavailable even to emperors and the richest people, no matter how much money they paid.

According to legend, Lucullus, a famous Roman general, had to send people to transport snow from the Apennine Mountains to eat iced desserts in summer; in 1924, the 16-year-old youngest son of US President Calvin Coolidge blistered his toe while playing tennis, and died of sepsis caused by bacterial infection, because penicillin was not discovered by Fleming until 1928 and mass-produced until the 1940s.

Economist Don Boudreaux once asked people to make a choice: would you like to be John D. Rockefeller in 1916 and only enjoy the technical conditions of that era? Many of the modern medical care, long-distance communication and audio-visual services that ordinary people can conveniently use today were unavailable even with money at that time.

When something is so "handy", people forget how much cost it used to take. When an extremely powerful community card is popularized to the whole society, people tend to erase it from their sense of happiness, and only stare at the missing private hole card in their hand and get upset. There is no way around it: humans are comparative animals, always seeking happiness from "differences".

10. Admitting you are a "dwarf" makes it easier to see the height of the giant's shoulders.

In 1676, Newton used the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" in a letter to Hooke to explain why he could see further. This phrase can be traced back to Bernard of Chartres, a 12th-century French philosopher, who said: "We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We can see more and farther things than the ancients, not because our eyesight is better or our stature is taller, but because the height of the giants lifts us up."

We do not need to reinvent writing, calculus and the printing press. It is not shameful to admit that our private hole cards are limited. As long as we learn to climb onto the shoulders of knowledge and tools paved by predecessors, your starting point will be the giant's altitude plus your own height.

11. More than half of the chips in Warren Buffett's wealth story come from the community cards of the era and the system.

At the Berkshire shareholders' meeting in 1997, Buffett talked about the famous "ovarian lottery": where a person is born, what talents he has, and what opportunities he can get are all highly accidental; the same ability, in a different social environment, may get completely different returns. In his 2018 annual letter to shareholders, he wrote that if the $114.75 he spent buying his first stock in March 1942 was invested in the S&P 500 index with no fees and reinvested dividends, as of January 31, 2019, this sum would become $606,811 before tax, an increase of more than 5,200 times.

When evaluating a person's achievements, looking at personal choices together with external community cards is often closer to the truth than only talking about personal talent or only talking about luck.

12. The community card of the future has already been laid on the table, but many people have not looked up yet.

William Gibson, the science fiction writer, said a famous quote in an interview in the late 1990s: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." Interestingly, he had already used the word "cyberspace" in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome. When he published Neuromancer in 1984, he did not even own a computer, and the whole book was typed on a manual portable typewriter.

Today, the huge community card of AI has been flipped right in the middle of the poker table. "Uneven distribution" means that the card has already been shown, but the speed at which different people access it differs by ten times. Those who look up to see the table earlier, even if they only have ordinary private hole cards as common as an old typewriter, can make new combinations first.

13. The wind direction is a community card, and the angle of the sail is the non-linear amplification of private hole cards and community cards.

Seneca, the ancient Roman philosopher, wrote in the 71st letter of Moral Letters to Lucilius: "When a man does not know to which port he is sailing, no wind is favorable." In the history of navigation technology, early square-rigged ships had weak ability to sail against the wind. Later, sailors mastered the triangular sail and the "tacking" zigzag sailing method: even if the wind blows 45 degrees obliquely from the front, as long as you adjust the angle of the sail and use the Bernoulli lift generated by the airflow, the ship can still move forward against the wind.

In the language of engineering, this is called "accepting input and changing the transfer function". We cannot control what community cards are flipped on the table, nor can we decide which direction the monsoon of the era blows. But as long as we hold the rudder and the angle of the sail, even headwinds can be decomposed into forward thrust. As I said earlier, in the real world, community cards and private hole cards are the length and width of a rectangle, and their utility is roughly equal to the area. The angle of the sail is like the non-linear method of combining private hole cards and community cards. (Of course, both descriptions are analogies.)

14. Hamming's "leaving the door open" reminds us to