Happy 40th Sesame Street: Let’s Count to 12!

This is how I learned how to count to 12.  Arguably the coolest counting song of all time (sung by the Pointer Sisters).  Thanks Sesame Street.

Risk vs Reward: A Quantum Hawk-Dove Game and the Financial Crash of 2008

In a paper uploaded to the Arxiv in April, a group of researchers headed up by Matthias Hanauske, approach the recent financial meltdown from a Quantum Evolutionary point of view.  Here’s the abstract:
The last financial and economic crisis demonstrated the dysfunctional long-term effects of aggressive behaviour in financial markets. Yet, evolutionary game theory predicts that [...]

No Ontology without Epistemology: Of God and Mathematicians

On the Big Ideas Blog there is a post about the different types of reasoning, Analytic vs. Synthetic, and their relavence to the existence or non-existence of God.  But, my favorite passage was one concerning we mathematicians:
The requirement of reasonableness might be illustrated as follows. Imagine Tom, John and Jane live in a country run [...]

Too Much Coffee Makes You Hallucinate … Cool!

A new study from Durham University showed that participants who drank 7 cups of coffee a day or more were more prone to hallucinations.   Sweet!  I wonder what happens when I drink 14 cups?
You know the old math joke:  what is a Mathematician?  A machine that turns coffee into theorems.  Maybe mathematicians actually think the [...]

Neuroscience Bootcamp at U Penn

I just found this at Neurophilosophy.  Apparently University of Pennsylvania is hosting a Neuroscience Bootcamp!
What happens at Neuroscience Boot Camp?
Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development [...]

Predicting Preferences is Rational

In a review of a paper by Camerer and Fehr on social neuroeconomics, Benoit Hardy-Vallée of Natural Rationality makes the point:

So basically, we have enough evidence to justify a model of rational agents as entertaining social preferences. As I argue in a forthcoming paper (let me know if you want to have a copy), these [...]

Decision Science News Blog

Check out this cool blog on Decision Science, that is, the science of how people make decisions in political/economic/business situations.  Very cool indeed.

Poliheuristic Theory: An Introduction

This post is part of a series of posts I’m working on covering some basic models in Decision Theory.  For my previous post on Cognitive models, click Here.
Decision theory in foreign policy analysis has been characterized by a split between two different, and at times rival, models of human behavior (James and Zhang, 2005).  The [...]

A Review of Cognitive Models and Bounded Rationality

Over the next few weeks (months?) I’ll be presenting a series of reviews of some of the major models in Decision Theory, a branch of both Economics and Political Science that has been on the rise for over 30 years. All of the models attempt to explain why humans act the way that they [...]

Why Biology Needs Mathematical Models

John Hawks reviews Peter Turchin’s 1998 book, Quantitative Analysis of Movement.
I tend to lecture about genetic models, for which there is a great value in simplicity (point 3), but which may require quite complicated extensions to handle reasonable biological populations (point 2). In that connection, some reasonable people go to extremes of interpretation — sometimes [...]