March 2012
17 posts
“5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well...”
– “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” Adrienne Rich (via whatiwanttosaytoyou)
“events happen, then are located further and further in the past”
– Time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“it is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.”
– Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems (via beryl-azure)
“A kiss on the forehead—erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.”
– Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine (via proustitute)
“I got your Letter, and the Birds—
The Maples never knew that you were coming—”
– Emily Dickinson, from “[1320]” (via proustitute)
Is it possible to describe Human Beings with...
isomorphisms: I hope that one day people will figure out the "perfect formula" for a constitution (balanced incentives / structure).
gsx002: I doubt it. Formulas belong to the math and logic realm.
isomorphisms: There is some logic to human interactions.
gsx002: That's using the word loosely. :)
isomorphisms: The promise of using maths to describe people is what got me interested in economics. I also do mathpsych.
isomorphisms: This is why I have high hopes for Acemoglu stuff. Also spatial voting theory, game theory, applications to constitutional design.
gsx002: I so have to follow these things more...I used to once upon a time.
gsx002: It's always fascinated me, but I still haven't met a really good Bayesian...and Newcomb's paradox is still tricky for me.
isomorphisms: I'm not saying a currently existing model [like Bayesian rationality]. Just that in theory a correct mathematical model of human behaviour seems (to me) possible.
isomorphisms: Not saying it would be super specific either. The difficulty in convincing people to my point of view is that few people know how loose abstract mathematics is. Cobordisms, homology, homotopy, topology are all very loose. Results in category theory are also quite loose.
isomorphisms: You can construct huge equivalence classes of things. Then you don't distinguish between very different things (famously, a coffee mug and a donut have the same topological equivalence class).
isomorphisms: Some abstract maths (like coalgebras) is actually criticised because "There are no calculations!"
gsx002: Hmm. . . i'd take the opposite bet . . . that there's a proof that there isn't or that there can't be such a model #Gödel
isomorphisms: Gödel is off-topic. His result was about pure maths.
isomorphisms: Even Arrow's Theorem has things fairly nailed down.
gsx002: Tarski then?
isomorphisms: Tarski also unrelated. Says ℝ is fuktup. I agree: especially for economics.
isomorphisms: I actually got Stan Wagon (a Tarski ball scholar) into a discussion on how ℝ is inappropriate for econ.
gsx002: ok, you forced me to bring out the big guns: sartre and camus! "we refuse to be modeled," or something like that :)
isomorphisms: They didn't know how loose abstract mathematics is either. =)
isomorphisms: Lacan thought there were applications of topology to psychoanalysis. Also there's a postmodernist at Ball State who says topology may be an appropriate tool for cultural analysis.
gsx002: I was talking about Tarski's Truth paradox.
isomorphisms: Oh. That's a linguistic problem. We don't have natural language logically figured out yet. However that's not a problem for behavioural modelling.
“This is a problem. Because pink happens when the red and violet sides get...”
– They Did It To Pluto, But Not To Pink! Please Not Pink! : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR
Pink is real, Science, REAL.
“I’m not denying that both high and low culture need women’s voices,...”
– Living La VIDA Loca (Sorry) | The Awl 