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Notes on: Dreams of a final theory (1992, Steven Weinberg)

by Siva, June 16-17, 2015. Many thanks to Victor Chua for lending me his copy of the book.


As I read the book, I notice that the perspective in particle physics (which is captured well in Weinberg's voice) evolves through the chapters. For example, the significance of renormalizability, the attention given to string theory, etc.

Chapter 1: Prologue

TL;DR: Does it make any sense to judge the optimality of human cognitive functioning by comparing against unrealistic economic toy models?

It seems fashionable these days, to talk about how humans are not "rational" due to many cognitive biases. I think we need to think about this more carefully.

Take some complicated problem in game theory that economists cannot solve/explain today. How could one expect the participants of the game to be able to solve the game (i.e. play rationally), when the experts do not understand how to? So it is impossible for the participants to act "rationally". Simply put, thoroughly solving situations (even if theoretically possible) requires computational capabilities beyond access to humans. By the way, this includes most daily social interactions. So, it's clear that in many many situations, humans act out of heuristic rules rather th

@dickfeynman
dickfeynman / sedscript_ruhoh2hakyll.sh
Created August 12, 2014 00:42
Fixing metadata for importing posts from Ruhoh to Hakyll
#!/bin/sh
# Strip single quotes of the date value
sed -i "/^date*/s/'//g" *.md
# Strip quotes off the tags list
sed -i "/^tags*/s/'//g" *.md
# Strip square brackets off the tags list
sed -i "/^tags*/s/\(\[\|\]\)//g" *.md
#!/bin/sh
#if grep 'tags'
#sed '{[/]<n>|<string>|<regex>[/]}d' <fileName>
for f in *.md
do
sed -i '2i\layout:\ post' $f
sed -i '/tags/d' $f