

The New Nostradamus? - jkush
http://www.goodmagazine.com/section/Features/the_new_nostradamus

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nostrademons
Anyone else reminded of Asimov's Foundation series? The whole (fictional)
science of psychohistory was based upon game theory and rational choice - the
idea that, given enough humans in the universe, all the irrational bits would
cancel out and human action would be completely predictable by mathematical
equations.

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lkozma
Even there, the theory failed, because it couldn't anticipate "the Mule".

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caudicus
This was a fascinating article (although the font size was headache-arific).

How do you think he implements his "models"? I was thinking of using a
glorified General Problem Solver to list our possible operations (elect this
person, elect that person, do this, do that) in order to reach an end goal,
the equilibrium. Maybe? Ideas?

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ced
The book seems interesting: <http://bdm.cqpress.com/>

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chaostheory
the thing I'm curious about is how he accounts for irrational behavior, since
game theory typically assumes that all parties behave rationally

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paul
The process can be rational even if the actors are not. Think of evolution.
People who pursue successful strategies (even if they do it for irrational
reasons) will be more successful (by definition).

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nextmoveone
Really interesting!

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lst
Faith can't be calculated, and it's the most unpredictable thing ever (even
more unpredictable than women or children...).

And, there's no chance ever that faith will become insignificant. Look at
Russia, a real religious boom now, after communism tried to kill faith...

Or look at non religious people: generally they end up treating some other
important interest of their life like a religion.

Sorry, dear mister Math, you forgot some non calculable ingredient...

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ereldon
Your point isn't addressing the fact that this guy is right more than everyone
else, most of the time.

Also, what's with the "women" comment?

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nostrademons
OTOH, it's a given that in any group of fortune-tellers, _someone_ will be
right more than everyone else. Unless there are other rational-choice
theorists with similar track records, this doesn't tell us much about the
validity of rational-choice theory itself.

One of the things that made Warren Buffett's "The Superinvestors of Graham &
Doddsville" so credible is that he listed a whole host of investors who _all_
used the same strategy yet invested in _different_ companies, and they all
ended up beating the market by a large amount. It's not enough to look at what
the leading practitioner in a field does, because he may be leading by luck.
It's also not enough to look at a group of leading practitioners who all take
the same actions, because luck might favor those actions and leave them all
well-off. But if a group of leading practitioners all follow the same
_principles_ yet take different actions, and they all do well, there's
probably something to those principles.

Same reason why you should never _just_ trust Paul Graham - he could've gotten
lucky with Viaweb and just been in the right place at the right time. However,
when he articulates the same principles as Marc Andreesen and Paul Buchheit
and Caterina Fake, all of whom have gotten rich under different circumstances
in different time periods, there might be something to them.

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davidw
And, while it's harder to find, you should look for negative evidence as well.
People who articulated and stuck to the same principles, and failed.

