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Super Rationality
Douglas Hofstadter sketched out a theory of super rationality in a couple of his Metamagical Themas columns in Scientific American in the mid-80s (he later collected his columns into a very interesting book). It was an attempt to solve the prisoner’s dilemma. The basic idea was that you should act as though everybody else is…
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The Choice Dilemma
Since I just mentioned it in a comment for my entry two days ago, I will mention the book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice, by Tom Slee. It’s an interesting book that applies game theory to simplified versions of real world problems. Although this is working at…
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Handheld Internet
A week ago I got an iPhone. I’m using it to write this entry. It’s an interesting device, since it shows, once again, an old lesson: the more a tool does for you, the more you notice its deficiencies. I say this not to dis the phone, which is actually quite nice. The interface in…
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Money or Votes?
I’m sure that many people have noticed that the stories about the presidential election race (the actual election is, of course, more than a year away) are handicapping the candidates by the amount of money they raise. Candidates who raise more money are doing better. The Democrats are beating the Republicans because they are raising…
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Reincarnating Government
In one of the more peculiar recent news stories, the Chinese government is setting the procedure for Tibetan Buddhist monks to reincarnate. The background for this is of course a forward looking attempt by the Chinese government to silence the future Dalai Lama. The Chinese government is presumably trying to avoid the confusion over the…