The following is a document recovered from the ruins of city Antioch, country new Australia, planet radian. Document dating has been inconclusive, but the style and contents suggest somewhere between 2542 2611. The document describes some of the aftermath of the great war, and tries to begin passing out the strained relations that led to the catastrophe in the first place. Author: unknown citizen. Access level: gamma. Begin document:
Document X-VA_\Omega
It's been a while since I've written anything here, but something came up lately that has drawn my attention, criticisms of Nash equilibrium. Most particularly I was reading this blog post about game theory, which seems to take the arguments of this paper seriously. As you can see both from the blog post, as well as the abstract of the paper, the idea is that Nash equilibria is a flawed concept because it treats players as knowing the strategies of the other players. While this may be a realistic assumption in, say Chess, it is ridiculous in zero-sum games where the entire point is to keep your strategy secret, like Poker. I am inherently skeptical of this for a simple reason, John Nash was not a bad mathematician. And I say this as someone who has read both his seminal papers (the one on Nash equilibria, and his thesis), and his book (Essays on Game Theory). In fact, his thesis includes a section talking about dealing with scenarios where players are not aware of the strategies of the other players. Moreover, the author in that link somehow got away with implying that John Von Neumann, another extremely talented mathematician, didn't add anything of value to economics with his work on game theory, all he did was add a new mathematical framework. (... Do you think that's all Galois did too? Or Descartes maybe, just adding pointless mathematics to things people were already doing anyway, silly mathematician?) Read more »
De gustibus non est disputandum is one of my favorite phrases. I often fall back onto it when dealing with political/religious/moral arguments where I don't feel like I could reason someone into agreement. Or sometimes when I don't see why I should have to. A discussion about soda can go: Other person: Pepsi is better than Coke. Me: No. Wrong. Other person: You are wrong. Me: shrug
But a political conversation can go the same way:
Other person: Position P is moral/good/just. Me: No. Wrong. Other person: You are wrong. Me: shrug
No one would have a problem with the first conversation. Some people might say that I should have stronger opinions on soda, but few would say that I'm inherently irrational or mistreating someone by simply disagreeing on the point, and shrugging.
But the second conversation could be a big deal. Read more »
In support of this conclusion, I have provided and summarized below information and comments on (1) recent soil testing performed at the site found elevated levels of arsenic are present in the soil (laboratory data); and (2) the North Carolina Foundation Housing Foundation Architect’s