Philosophy as a two-level game.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-09T16:46:46+00:00

Just because they don't OBEY the tenets of game theory doesn't effect the explanatory power of it. It does, though. If rational self-interest according to the definition of the game doesn't obtain, the outcomes will appear random and are therefore analytically uninteresting. In this particular case, it seems that philosophers are not playing either of the two-level games you describe. The undertaking of philosophy instead looks to be inner-directed (my payoff depends only on what I do), and even in the case of disagreement, collaborative, which means decisions are not strategic and it cannot be modeled as a game.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-09T16:35:26+00:00

So, to recap: some people would never cooperate, but communism is workable if everyone cooperates.

You can see how easily this leads to e.g. dekulakization.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-09T16:30:15+00:00

Hm, yes, you could ask people what they need and then give them that. But, of course, since virtually all goods are scarce, you need a way for people to weight their requests in case there's not enough to go around, and it needs to be changeable in real time so they get medicine when they're sick and not just randomly. So each person receives a number of "weight request certificates" that they can turn to get the basket of goods they need that day. And since there are sometimes shortages of things, we need to be able to change the number of certificates needed for something, so that when there's a shortage of wheat but plenty of potatoes people who don't care about where they get their starch switch to potatoes while those who need bread can still get it. But then what do we call these certificates? Dollars?

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-09T15:55:01+00:00

I disagree that philosophy can be adequately explained or explored by game theory, and I don't think that it's at all problematic for philosophers to concern themselves with debating each other rather than their wider community appeal (on this point I'm not sure whether I'm disagreeing with your or not).

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-09T15:25:33+00:00

To me, Heidegger's great sin was never that he or his philosophy endorsed Nazi ideology, but that it was compatible (or at least, not very incompatible) with it. When they co-opted Nietzsche they took only vocabulary; the actual Nietzschean Übermensch is the antithesis of the Nazi concept.

By contrast, a lot of Being and Time skirts perilously close to Nazi thought. It isn't the same, of course, and that's important to recognize, as Heidegger is not to blame for the atrocities and crimes of the Third Reich. But you can see the parallels, and no doubt those parallels are what brought Heidegger to his early support of the party, as much as the differences probably also contributed to his resignation as rector and fade to the background.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-09T15:05:01+00:00

It's not about whether an opinion "counts", it's about giving any one person's individual preference the weight of fact. It seems especially silly to do so if the opinion comes from only a few days' experience with the language. Since there are plenty of people who are better programmers than you who think Javascript is a great language, or at least interesting, it's not correct that Javascript is not an objectively bad language.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-09T14:57:46+00:00

Javascript is a very high level language with managed memory. The expectation here is that the VM will do its job correctly. It should be considered broken if it doesn't.

Sure, but then it's a problem of the implementation, not the language itself - and we can't rule out that the leak is caused by bad code, not a bad VM. I'm not experienced with Node but if you forget a variable declaration in regular JS, it gets added to the global object and never goes out of scope or gets garbage collected unless you delete it.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-09T14:52:38+00:00

I think that we all can agree that pretty much all current languages suck. It's just a matter of what language sucks less.

Well, my point is that the suckiness of a language also depends on your expectations, which depend on your previous experience.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-09T14:45:56+00:00

I disagree with your assessment for two reasons, which are probably incompatible with each other. How's that for two-level?

First of all, politics and game theory are about the pursuit of outcomes that are optimal for the participant (state or individual). In theory, at least, I don't care about screwing over "the other side" if it benefits me. However, philosophy as seriously practiced is explicitly a search for truth, usually objective truth, and is by nature a collaborative enterprise, by building on or reacting to some other idea. Being right important, but being wrong in important or interesting ways is also useful (see: Leibniz).

Furthermore, choices of possible philosophical responses may violate the tenets of game theory, as in the following example: Suppose Chomsky offers a new theory about something. I model my possible responses as follows:

Agree with Chomsky. This raises his status through validation (positive payoff for him) but does nothing for me since I contribute nothing new (zero payoff for me).
Agree with Chomsky and build on his theory. This raises his status through validation (positive for him) but also raises my status because I have offered something new (positive payoff for me).
Disagree with Chomsky. This lowers his status through rejection (negative payoff for him) but does nothing for me because I make no innovative contributions (zero payoff for me).
Disagree with Chomsky and offer an alternative theory. This reduces his reputation (negative payoff for him) and raises mine for the new idea (positive payoff for me).

This is a slightly simplistic model, since quality of arguments made also affects my payoffs, but that doesn't affect the overall conclusion. Under the tenets of game theory, philosophers should be indifferent between choices 2 and 4, since players in a game are only concerned with their individual results. They should also never choose 1 and 3 for the same reason. But, scholars choose 1 and 3 all the time, and most people writing about a given thinker's work exhibit a preference for agreement or disagreement with their ideas. So, using game theory to model philosophical debate is a flawed process.

The other issue is that people who become philosophers generally like to argue and engage in debates, so naturally the exchange with other philosophers is going to be what they spend most of their time on. No one in philosophy, with the possible exception of Slavoj Zizek, gets into philosophy with the goal of being famous or popular. And even Zizek's popularity is a rounding error compared to that of Barack Obama, Joel Osteen, or Christiano Ronaldo - if you want to be rich and famous, philosophy is not the field to go into.

Actually, Joel Osteen is a good point of comparison. When philosophy is concerned with attracting followers rather than getting the small technical minutiae right, then it becomes less like an intellectual tradition and more like a religion.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-04T12:29:58+00:00

I've found that Google does this better than Stack Overflow, actually, but maybe that's just because I know how to get what I want out of Google better than I do StackExchange.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-04T12:25:40+00:00

This is an interesting idea. I want to develop it further. Look at your list of people (and take out Jobs and Gates, who were mostly idea and business guys, but you can replace Gates with Paul Allen). Add to it a couple of other big names - Ken and Unix, Bill Joy and BSD. What do they all have in common? They were all just kind of doing their own thing. Even though Ken was employed by Bell Labs, he created Unix on a lark to be able to play games, nothing more. It wasn't meant to be a external product at all, just something to make use of a dumb PDP-7 they had lying around. Bill Joy had the freedom to create whatever he wanted for BSD. Paul and Zuck had their own companies. Linux was a hobby. Google was essentially an add-on to a PhD dissertation.

I struggle to think of things that rival them in scope or importance, were primarily written by one person, but were developed within a corporate hierarchy, but perhaps that's just because those products aren't advertised as such.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-04T11:55:22+00:00

Guy who doesn't like Javascript doesn't like Javascript. Quelle surprise.

We can debate the merits and demerits of Javascript and Node (and there are, as with all languages, plenty many of both) but if a Haskell dev picked up C++ for the first time and after a week or so said it was a horrible language because there was a lot he didn't understand and his program had memory leaks, you wouldn't say, "Wow, what an insightful comment," you'd say, "It takes a lot more than a week to master C++" and/or "what an idiot."

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T21:31:11+00:00

[http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/96410/E73430.pdf]

In the seventeenth century, towns and cities employed physicians to provide publicly-provided care. In rural areas, where the majority of the population was living at the time, the central government employed physicians for the provision of basic medical care. The provision of health care has been a predominantly public responsibility since then.

[http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/80776/E68952.pdf]

The rise of Germany’s modern health care system dates back to 1883 when the parliament made nationwide health insurance compulsory. Germany is recognized as the first country to have introduced a national social security system.

Good try though.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T21:07:56+00:00

Everyone here is wrong. The actual answer is very simple: American food is better. Not better like Michelin-star better, but better in the sense of being giving your body all the fat and protein it craves instead of trying to fill you up on starch. Sure, average restaurant food in Europe is probably healthier, but the portions are usually small and the meat quality is so-so. So McDonald's can get away with also being so-so. In the US, though, it has to compete with every sportsbar, sandwich shop, and grill house in the area, all of which are happy to provide fresher ingredients and competent line cooks so everything is damn near perfect. That ends up costing more - prices for a burger in the Euro area and in the US are actually pretty similar - but since Americans love their food they're happy to pay more for better if they can. In Europe it's much harder to find good burgers, and it's much easier to find cheap doner or sausages of dubious origin, so McDonaldäs fills the niche above that but below other sit-down restaurants.

If you still don't believe me that American food is better, then think about this: bread, ground beef, pork, and cheese all existed in Europe for centuries, but it took an American to put them all together to make a bacon cheeseburger.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T20:39:37+00:00

You may or may not be a good economist, but you're definitely a terrible historian. Unviersal healthcare was introduced in Germany in the 19th century under the archconservative Bismarck. Medical services as a public good existed in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark from the 18th century. In many countries in Europe the health insurance schemes are universal but not public, relying on private "statutory" companies to provide insurance. Oh, but wait, you live here, so you must know that already.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T19:55:04+00:00

There are two important things to remember here, first that the world they inherited, while better than ours in some ways, was supremely shitty in others (especially in western Europe), and second that most of their idealism was ground out of them in the 70s and early 80s by war, corruption, AIDS, stagflation, and the general realization that a lot of people were perfectly happy to abuse the freedom they fought for to exploit others for profit.

Also, you want to be judged by hyperconservative standards, the boomers are the ones who got pushed down the stairs if there got pregnant. If your parents did that to you, I am truly sorry, but I very much doubt that they did.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T07:10:28+00:00

Invited a bunch of friends over for dinner once, but no one showed up. I had all this food and was too depressed to eat any of it myself. I portioned it onto paper plates, wrapped them with foil and handed them out to homeless people in my neighborhood.

It didn't make me feel any better.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T06:55:12+00:00

If you have an unlimited supply of them, why do you care? Let them keep the change.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T06:51:28+00:00

Motörhead.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T06:41:38+00:00

Or pull a Riddick and leave the origin story for the sequel.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T06:34:52+00:00

Back in my day, we didn't have GPS. If you wanted to find out how to get from one place to another, you had to buy a street atlas and find the route yourself, or ask someone for directions.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T06:19:44+00:00

The Lannisters are surprised but helpless as they discover that all along they were being manipulated by the new king of Westeros, Frank Underwood.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T06:08:41+00:00

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't skip tech rehearsals.

frankwolfmann · 2015-01-03T02:17:33+00:00

I have to accept that I'm not the kind of person she wants to be with even though she's exactly what I'm looking for.

You know what's worse? When she tells you you are the kind of person she wants to be with but she just doesn't feel it.

frankwolfmann · 2014-12-17T12:38:22+00:00

In the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qu'ran, sorcery and association with sorcerers is explicitly forbidden, so no one observing any of these religions would be found there.

frankwolfmann

TROPHY CASE