The New Nostradamus? | Hacker News Reader

The New Nostradamus?

goodmagazine.com

18 pointsjkush11 comments

Anyone else reminded of Asimov's Foundation series? The whole (fictional) science of psychohistory was based upon game theory and rational choice - the idea that, given enough humans in the universe, all the irrational bits would cancel out and human action would be completely predictable by mathematical equations.

Even there, the theory failed, because it couldn't anticipate "the Mule".

This was a fascinating article (although the font size was headache-arific).

How do you think he implements his "models"? I was thinking of using a glorified General Problem Solver to list our possible operations (elect this person, elect that person, do this, do that) in order to reach an end goal, the equilibrium. Maybe? Ideas?

The book seems interesting: http://bdm.cqpress.com/

the thing I'm curious about is how he accounts for irrational behavior, since game theory typically assumes that all parties behave rationally

The process can be rational even if the actors are not. Think of evolution. People who pursue successful strategies (even if they do it for irrational reasons) will be more successful (by definition).

Really interesting!

Faith can't be calculated, and it's the most unpredictable thing ever (even more unpredictable than women or children...).

And, there's no chance ever that faith will become insignificant. Look at Russia, a real religious boom now, after communism tried to kill faith...

Or look at non religious people: generally they end up treating some other important interest of their life like a religion.

Sorry, dear mister Math, you forgot some non calculable ingredient...

Your point isn't addressing the fact that this guy is right more than everyone else, most of the time.

Also, what's with the "women" comment?

OTOH, it's a given that in any group of fortune-tellers, someone will be right more than everyone else. Unless there are other rational-choice theorists with similar track records, this doesn't tell us much about the validity of rational-choice theory itself.

One of the things that made Warren Buffett's "The Superinvestors of Graham & Doddsville" so credible is that he listed a whole host of investors who all used the same strategy yet invested in different companies, and they all ended up beating the market by a large amount. It's not enough to look at what the leading practitioner in a field does, because he may be leading by luck. It's also not enough to look at a group of leading practitioners who all take the same actions, because luck might favor those actions and leave them all well-off. But if a group of leading practitioners all follow the same principles yet take different actions, and they all do well, there's probably something to those principles.

Same reason why you should never just trust Paul Graham - he could've gotten lucky with Viaweb and just been in the right place at the right time. However, when he articulates the same principles as Marc Andreesen and Paul Buchheit and Caterina Fake, all of whom have gotten rich under different circumstances in different time periods, there might be something to them.

And, while it's harder to find, you should look for negative evidence as well. People who articulated and stuck to the same principles, and failed.

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