Comment by snaky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snaky | Hacker News Reader

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Never read anything (except academic publications) about the field you know in deep, especially blogs and journals/magazines. Violation of this rule may lead to depression, misanthropy and lack of faith in humanity.

BTW, the author's POV on game theory:

Personally I’m not a big fan of game theory for two core reasons. First it limits your thinking to a frame of move-countermove when in real life things are a lot more dynamic and complex. In fact, in many cases you can build quite an advantage without worrying about what your opponents or competitors are doing. Second it utilizes a model of the “intelligent rational decision makers” which according to many studies in behavioral economics is incorrect. -- http://refactoredthinking.com/author/refactoredthinking/

Yes while I'm certainly not an expert in game theory (which is still an evolving field) my reservations with it are with the core principles of it mentioned above. If you notice an inefficiency in the marketplace, you might be able to exploit it before your competition even knows what moves you made. In many cases they won't care.

Part of that may be a misunderstanding of game theory.

Game theory is about assessing what your possible strategies are, what everybody else's possible strategies are, and what the outcomes could be.

Where game theory completely falls down is when one tries to use it for calculating specifically what to do. Even under perfect rationality assumptions, the calculations usually don't go well. What's worse, if you perturb that assumption even slightly, the answers may change significantly. (So yes, the rational behavior part of your critique is indeed a sound one.)

I quoted your POV on game theory not to say it's wrong or incomplete. And I find your blog very interesting as well.

The problem with the readers specialized in some field mentioned in article is quite common and not to be seen as writer's fault.

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