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Comment by kauffj | Hacker News Reader

Therefore the only playing field left is: what do they have and what do they know?

This portrays people as something akin to a Markov process: if you know these two properties, you can make meaningful predictions about the future. Are people so memoryless? It strikes me that at a minimum, history, experience, and culture would all influence behavior and aren't so neatly stateful.

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>>> It strikes me that at a minimum, history, experience, and culture would all influence behavior and aren't so neatly stateful.

At least in the US, clearly history has taught us nothing. Our leaders continually make the same errors in regards to foreign policy, military intervention, and myriad of other things.

Those are not mistakes, they [the leaders] benefit directly from that.

This is spot on. The 'right' decisions are profit for a very small minority. Those same decisions are nearly always negative to the majority, especially in a global arena where Iraqi civilians for example don't have the chance to vote democrat or republican!

> Are people so memoryless? It strikes me that at a minimum, history, experience, and culture would all influence behavior and aren't so neatly stateful.

Problem is all of this can be reduced to a single dimension - health and energy. No matter what information is going on in your head, your body requires energy to move and to think, thereby limiting the possible future states out of sheer necessity.

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