Uncertainty in the Prisoners Dilemma

This is kind of a long read but still good. If some people don't have time to read the entire article a quick synopsis would be to read the last section entitled, "Critique of Pure (Classical) Reason."

http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2012/11/06/humans-think-like-quantum-particles-scientific-american/

I will probably reference this in my following post on game theory.

Post election thought

My thoughts on the election

The election had a surprising outcome.  Jared won the popular vote, while Gloria won both the pair-wise elimination vote and the vote for which we ranked the three candidates.  I think Gloria received more points than Jared and Nate in the two votes she won because she didn't set herself in opposition to either of them.  So, when it came to ranking candidates, supporters of Nate likely assigned Jared a value of 1, and supporters of Jared, likely assigned Nate a value of 1, but both supporters of Nate and supporters of Jared likely assigned Gloria a value of 2.  So Gloria, in effect, received some support from both supporters of Nate and supporters of Jared, and also complete support from supporters of her campaign.
In the pairwise elimination, supporters of Nate likely selected Gloria when choosing between Jared and Gloria, and supporters of Jared likely selected Gloria when choosing between Nate and Gloria.  The opposition set between Nate and Jared allowed for opponents of either campaign to, in effect, vote against their candidates opponent.

Dictatorship shenanigans

Last Thursdays election class was preceded by two days of what I can only say was shenanigans. Even though they were pretty good shenanigans it reminded me of how ridiculous election time is with all of the shameless self promotion and taking down of opponents by cold logical rebuttals. The only person that I thought composed themselves well was Gloria, but part of her campaign committee did place an absurd assumption based on a loose interpretation of an article.

Besides all of the tomfoolery, it was interesting that Gloria won, Jared got the popular votes, and Nathan lost. It really didn't surprise me that Gloria won due to partial the large population of women in the class and also do to her passive standing in the election. It is amusing, and kind of shocking, that Jared won the popular vote when all he did was inflate himself with no real solid stand point. His campaign was all "feel good" images and false promises (like politics!). Lastly, I thought it was strange that Nathan got dead last in two of the ways to tally votes and second in another because I thought his tactic for Dictator was quite logical. But that assumes humans are logical which has been proven time and time again to not be the case.

On the topic of voting systems I was kind of taken aback to on how small of a margin of difference in actual votes there was but how different the systems tallied and predicted different winners. This does beg the question can there be a basis for tallying votes? It seems that the question is no because is dependent on what the voting system favors.

Writers learning mathematics?

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/writers-should-learn-math.html

My general thoughts

My fellow colleagues,
 First of all, All Hail the Glorious light of exalted Queen Gloria, As I look back and reread the blog post. This is the only reaction I have to the overall race in general

Sincerely,
Jared Good
The self-proclaimed Phoenix King 

some thoughts on this election

Okay I don't know if anyone else has noticed and/or thought of this, but I thought there was something rather peculiar - and, in my opinion, absolutely hilarious - that I observed during this quick 2-day mock campaign.

Hopefully I am not over- or under-representing any of the parties here (and by no means do I mean any offense that might be taken), but it appears to me at least that, even though we seemingly chose three random people in the class at random, the candidates have analagously defaulted into almost exactly the same party system we have today.

There is the liberal Jared Good, who responds plentifully and immediately, makes ludicrously high-minded promises of salvation and getting everyone an A, and even took credit for eliminating something that was never there in the first place (I'm not saying this is solely indicative of liberals, but there is something to be said about how closely it mirrors actual politicians). Overall message: 'I'm one of you.'

Then there is the conservative Nathan "Philosopher King" Holman, whose rational-minded tactics are based primarily on criticizing his opponent (again, not a sole attribute of conservatives, but notable nonetheless) and dealing with facts. Overall message: 'Let's take care of business.'

And then there is the third-party Gloria Larson, who...I'm sorry I really don't mean to sound so derogatory, but so far I have only seen one thing from her regarding the election campaign and it was a very sweet and personalizing message that didn't take a position on anything one way or the other (presumably she will do so in class) and felt very much to me like the kind of campaigns run by the various third-party candidates, who are so overshadowed by the other candidates that they are hardly even noticeable. Overall message: 'May the best candidate win.'

Now I could be wrong here (I was very tired on Tuesday so I may have missed something), but I don't ever recall any general rules on the parties and positions of this in-class election. So I find it extremely interesting that, beginning from random, the three candidates so quickly defaulted into the roles of the "three" parties we have today. Surprised the crap out of me - I mean I could see that type of thing occurring over time like weeks or months, but I never would have guessed that it could do so to this degree in a matter of days.