I managed to pick up a revised hardcover copy (1973) of this classic from 1964 and thought I’d give it another read.
Drutopia’s mission sounds a little to me like Drupal with Indieweb philosophy baked in from the start. It’s also not too different from Backdrop CMS’s mission as a Drupal fork.
Testing out status updates for Post Kinds and how they set the Post Formats.
Sallying forth with my decision to post notes (aka status updates) into my system which don’t have any titles. I suppose I can put some other bit of data into my admin UI to better track them within the system.
Making a quiche with sausage, mushrooms, shallots, garlic, and cheese from scratch this morning for brunch later today with friends at Gerrish Swim & Tennis Club. I’m hoping the crust will come out as flaky as I want it to.
The section here on the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president with significant help by the communication incumbent (Western Union) of the time sounds eerily like the influence which Facebook likely had on the election of Donald J. Trump. The more I read this the more I’m scared and can’t wait for yet another disruption of communication technology.
literally, as in Keynes’ (1936) phrase, taking into account “what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.”
page 46
…perfect rationality in the market cannot be well defined. Infinitely intelligent agents cannot form expectations in a determinate way.
This type of behavior–coming up with appropriate hypothetical models to act upon, strengthening confidence in those that are validated, and discarding those that are not–is called inductive reasoning.
page 47
We see immediately that the market possesses a psychology. We define this as the collection of market hypotheses, or expectational models or mental beliefs, that are being acted upon at a given time.
page 48
the first(?) mention of a genetic model in the book
Chapter 2 is a nice piece on the El Farol Problem which is a paradox which “represented a decision problem where expectations (forecasts) that many would attend [the El Farol bar] would lead to few attending, and expectations that few would attend would lead to many attending: expectations would lead to outcomes that would negate these expectations.”
Zhang and Challet generalized this problem into the Minority Game in game theoretic form.
Page 31:
There are two reasons for perfect or deductive rationality to break down under complication. The obvious one is that beyond a certain level of of complexity human logical capacity ceases to cope–human rationality is bounded. The other is that in interactive situations of complication, agents cannot rely upon the other agents they are dealing with to behave under perfect rationality, and so they are forced to guess their behavior. This lands them in a world of subjective beliefs and subjective beliefs about subjective beliefs. Objective, well-defined, shared assumptions then cease to apply. In turn, rational, deductive reasoning (deriving a conclusion by perfect logical processes from well-defined premises) itself cannot apply. The problem becomes ill-defined.
This passage, though in an economics text, seems to be a perfect statement about part of the problem of governing in the United States at the moment. I have a thesis that Donald Trump is a system 1 thinker and is generally incapable of system 2 level thought, thus he has no ability to discern the overall complexity of the situations in which he finds himself (or in which the United States finds itself). As a result, he’s unable to effectively lead. From a complexity and game theoretic standpoint, he feels he’s able to perfectly play and win any game. His problem is that he feels like he’s playing tic-tac-toe, while many see at least a game as complex as checkers. In reality, he’s playing a game far more complex than either chess or go.
The overall problem laid out in this chapter is an interesting one vis-a-vis the issues many restaurant startups face, particularly in large cities. How can they best maximize their attendance not only presently, but in the long term while staying afloat in very crowded market places.
Page 38:
The level at which humans can apply perfect rationality is surprisingly modest. Yet it has not been clear how to deal with imperfect or bounded rationality.
Chapter 3 takes a similar problem as Chapter 2 and ups the complexity of the problem somewhat substantially. While I understand that at the time these problems may have seemed cutting edge and incomprehensible to most, I find myself wondering how they didn’t see it all from the beginning.
