Re: game theory

[andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>]

>
> >  Nash went mad, but you can't
> argue with his maths.<
>
> you can easily argue about the applicability of the
> math. Math doesn't correspond to reality; it only
> represents the abstract dimension.
>
> By the way, Nash is currently deemed sane. And his
> sanity or insanity has nothing to do with the
> validity of the Nash equilibrium concept or of game
> theory.
>

I actually knew Nash a bit when he was mad. The math
majors at Tigetown called him the Ghost of Fine Hall.
He would scrawl brilliant and bitingly hilarious
"formulae" on the blackboards -- not at all like the
merely wacko stuff depicted in the movie, much
funnier. Political too. And not right wing. Apparently
he hated Nixon. That wasn't hard, of course. My friend
(at the time, haven't been in touch in years) Dave
Donoho, now a hotshot stat prof at Stanford, said that
mathematically Nash's crazy "formulae" _almost_ made
sense.

Sorry I teed you off about your post on madness, but
frankly I was surprised to read your remarks about GT
in the context of the Westlake book and your
substantive post -- reread them yourself and see if
you can see how someone might understand the point the
way I did. Of course I know it's easy to be
misconstrued, having had it happy to me a lot. But as
a lawyer I've learned to assume that it's not
necessarily the other guy's fault -- something I for
one at least didn't learn as an academic. Maybe you
have, but if so, given that you know how hard it to be
clear and how easy it is to me misunderstood, maybe it
would be helpful to be less uptight about being
misunderstood even if it is the other guy's fault.

For instance, not that I am a shining examplar of
anything, I said about eight times in my post that GT
was an abstraction, an idealization, and based on
false premises, and yet apparently I still wasn't
clear enough. Still, it's not worth getting mad about
. . . .

jks




__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! - Internet access at a great low price.
http://promo.yahoo.com/sbc/