As anyone who reads this blog probably knows, logical discourse is something I spend a good deal of time thinking about. So, as is my wont, I now turn my eye to how logical discourse relates to information. In my view, logical discourse serves two major functions: in the first place, it allows you to [...]
It seems common to disparage twitter by saying that people are just sharing mindless minutiae that no one cares about.Maybe it is the case that twitter is, in fact, a time-wasting endeavor filled with people just pumping out tons of information that no one cares about. I am much more inclined to believe, however, that [...]
In several of my recent posts, I laid out my case for how it might not undermine all of economic thinking to find that people aren’t necessarily rational. One of my key points was that you can model irrationality as rationality, but this does raise the question: What good are models in the first place? [...]
One of the workhorse concepts in Richard McKenzie’s excellent book Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies and Other Pricing Puzzles is the idea that consumers can be rationally ignorant. Consider an argument he puts forth in Chapter 9 (entitled Why So Many Prices End in ‘9′) — he contends that one reason for [...]
Previously, I’ve made the case that for the purposes of modeling, it doesn’t matter if people are truly rational (where rational is defined as always making decisions in such a way to maximize their utility functions to the best of their ability). However, just because, for the purposes of modeling, the two things are equivalent [...]
On Wednesday, I wrote about the role markets play in aggregating information. Today I thought I would go into some more detail about how I see the mechanistic properties of markets. Consider the example of the iterated betting market from my previous post – even throwing out any discussion of incentives, the effect still arises [...]
Seeing as how I like to define logic and symmetry in the context of their relationships with information, it should come as no surprise that I’ve also been very interested in what Hayek had to say about the role of information in markets. The general contention of Hayek’s 1945 paper The Use of Knowledge In [...]
On Monday, I made the case that enumerating the symmetry properties of a system allows you to compress redundant information. The other useful consequence of understanding the inherent symmetries of a system is that it immediately allows you to understand which dimensions will be relevant to a given problem.
Consider the fact that any decision [...]
Before I continue to post my analyses of the various ideas that I am constantly mulling over, I thought that I would take a brief detour and explain a bit of how my thought process works. Fundamental to how I view the world is the idea of symmetry. What I mean by symmetry is whether [...]
In part one of this two-part series, I introduced my thoughts on how logic can be used to extract (but not introduce) information from the premises using 4×4 su doku with no unique solution. In this follow-up post, my intention was to discuss the more subtle forms of information extraction that can be done with [...]
Physical chemistry Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley and all around curious guy.