tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post2069691869971634282..comments2023-06-18T01:25:08.748-07:00Comments on Information Transfer Economics: A Socratic dialog on information equilibrium in economicsJason Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12680061127040420047noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-30819784901947784732015-01-24T16:39:23.630-08:002015-01-24T16:39:23.630-08:00I remember once promoting to a knight in a game to...I remember once promoting to a knight in a game to put the king in check. Thanks for the link.Jason Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12680061127040420047noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-53379298178818209502015-01-24T14:52:42.013-08:002015-01-24T14:52:42.013-08:00"Underpromotion" to a bishop occurs abou..."Underpromotion" to a bishop occurs about 0.2% of the time a promotion happens, the motivation being to avoid an immediate stalemate which might occur if the promotion were to a queen.<br /><br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotion_%28chess%29 Tom Brownhttp://www.google.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-85674841753702027252015-01-24T14:45:29.913-08:002015-01-24T14:45:29.913-08:00I see what you're saying now. That makes sense...I see what you're saying now. That makes sense and answers my question about having no pieces there too (I was imagining something different). So you really are calculating a loose upper bound, and there's nothing special about rooks: just an example. Yes, I thought about the queen thing too, but remind me: you can promote you pawn to anything? Not just a piece you've lost? I'll look it up. Thanks.Tom Brownhttp://www.google.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-19652118774072200752015-01-23T18:45:32.510-08:002015-01-23T18:45:32.510-08:00info: Hey econ.
econ: What's up?
info: I mis...info: Hey econ.<br /><br />econ: What's up?<br /><br />info: I mis-spoke the other day when we were talking.<br /><br />econ: Oh yeah?<br /><br />info: Yeah, it really should be the rate of wins by one player that should be the price in the chess model.<br /><br />econ: Why is that?<br /><br />info: Well, both really work, because they're supposed to be equal to each other ... a 50% win loss ratio is a rate of 0.5 wins per game. It's just that the ratio is the right hand side of the equation and the derivative is the left hand side.<br /><br />econ: I still don't really get what you're saying.<br /><br />info: I know. It just started to bother me.<br /><br />econ: You should let it go. People make mistakes all the time. I don't think that piece was what prevented me from getting your theory.<br /><br />info: Cheers. Talk to you later.Jason Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12680061127040420047noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-26103425654980772092015-01-23T14:44:44.440-08:002015-01-23T14:44:44.440-08:00And about QFT, really all it is is a consistent ma...And about QFT, really all it is is a consistent marriage of special relativity and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is non-relativistic QFT, and QFT is relativistic quantum mechanics.<br /><br />Knowing QFT does tend to make you not care about the 'interpretations' of quantum mechanics. I'd say they're a bit like interpreting supply and demand as utility or the price mechanism as an information aggregation process. At the end of the day, they don't change the calculations you do, just your intuition about them. One source of the many interpretations is the fact that there are several interpretations of probability.<br /><br />My own thinking about it led me to believe that quantum mechanics is all about information passing through Rindler horizons, similar to this:<br /><br /><a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2739" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2739</a><br /><br />If you think about it, most places where the wierd things in quantum mechanics happens are when your particle crosses over a Rindler horizon (basically going into the elsewhere piece of a space time diagram). I even have been working on a derivation of an entropic quantum mechanics from the fluctuation theorem. But the math behind the Liouville equation is hard:<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liouville%27s_theorem_(Hamiltonian)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liouville%27s_theorem_(Hamiltonian)</a>Jason Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12680061127040420047noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-57514549618937656832015-01-23T14:26:43.833-08:002015-01-23T14:26:43.833-08:00It's not pollution; and it's not like I ha...It's not pollution; and it's not like I have hundreds of commenters asking questions :)<br /><br />In my statement, I said they were either direct questions or quotes from various sources. I never talked to Lucas or Athreya, I just quoted them (the part about rejecting too many good models and "liking" the assumptions, respectively).<br /><br />Sumner (directly) and Krugman (indirectly) were the source of the "story" comment. Noah Smith posted about the BART ridership model. House wrote a post about physicists and economics. In a brief interaction with Robin Hanson via email, he made something like the statement about information economics. Wren-Lewis had a post about economists being more like doctors recently. Rowe asked me point blank about what information had to do with supply and demand. I think that's it for the exact references ... the others are more vague and probably come from an agglomeration of sources. I didn't mean to diss anyone that wasn't listed :)Jason Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12680061127040420047noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-63686838212069465542015-01-23T14:15:25.239-08:002015-01-23T14:15:25.239-08:00Since each side starts with two rooks and 8 pawns ...Since each side starts with two rooks and 8 pawns that could potentially be promoted (not sure how they get around each other, but leave that out for now), you can't have more than 20 rooks on the board. That means a fortiori 64 rooks impossible.<br /><br />And yes, you can get two black-square bishops by promoting a pawn. However, the microfoundations suggest that you would choose to promote to a queen :)Jason Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12680061127040420047noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-67135997600718539322015-01-23T13:16:06.368-08:002015-01-23T13:16:06.368-08:00One of my co-workers here (a mathematician) used t...One of my co-workers here (a mathematician) used to write his own econ blog years ago. He hosted it from a machine at his home. He was shocked one day to see that the number of hits he was getting was going through the roof, and it turned out that Brad DeLong had stumbled across one of his pieces and featured it in one of his posts! Lol. What about Brad? Any interaction with him?Tom Brownhttp://www.google.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-14225040276549411962015-01-23T13:12:29.620-08:002015-01-23T13:12:29.620-08:00David Glasner too perhaps? (for you list). David B...David Glasner too perhaps? (for you list). David Beckworth? Nick Edmonds. Cullen Roche (not an economist, but still you got a skeptical reaction there I think). Have you ever had any interaction with Robert Waldmann, Steve Randy Waldman, J. W. Mason, James Caton, Roger Farmer, Steve Keen or JKH?<br /><br />I recall that JP Koning emailed Michael Woodford once and got a reply. Vincent Cate tried it too, but came up with nothing. (c:Tom Brownhttp://www.google.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-38109130793096019462015-01-23T12:55:28.947-08:002015-01-23T12:55:28.947-08:00Jason, I enjoyed your dialog. Your frustration com...Jason, I enjoyed your dialog. Your frustration comes through. Tell me, when did you interact with Karthik Athreya? I recall trying to direct him and/or his grad student to your blog a while back (back When he wrote a guest post on Noahpinion), but I didn't think anything came of it.<br /><br />Also in your chess analogy, why not just eliminate the "no pieces on the board" as impossible rather than add it in? That's never the case, right? There may be other impossible states, but that seems like an easy one to discount.<br /><br />Of course I'm sure you've left a few people off of your list of credits at the end (no doubt in the interests of brevity), but didn't you get a similar response from Stephen Williamson, David Andolfatto, Michael Freimuth, Marcus Nunes, Mark Sadowski and JP Koning? They all seem to contribute to that dialog a bit, no? Did you ever get a response from John Cochrane? I know I posted links to your posts on John's blog on several occasions, but I never saw a response.<br /><br />I wonder if you wouldn't have more luck getting a big name physicist interested in the ITM rather than an economist? I noticed that Sean Carroll did a "Google hangout" with a couple of philosophers the other day, since he's a "philosophy friendly" physicist. I'm not sure what good that would do (that is getting interest from a cross-discipline physicist), but perhaps it would do something. If the econ people feel threatened by bigger name barbarians at the gate, perhaps it'll force a more thoughtful response at some point. I liked Carroll's insistence on using models in a debate he did with a guy named William Lane Craig. (I hadn't even heard of Carroll until a week ago, but have since become a fan). Here's his philosophy "hangout":<br /><br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTn_4fCDbkY<br /><br />On a totally different topic, I watched a youtube video yesterday with Brian Greene hosting four different people who had different interpretations of quantum physics, one of which was Sean Carroll and another was a guy proposing what he called QBism (quantum Bayesian interpretation I think).<br /><br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdqC2bVLesQ<br /><br />Do you have an opinion on this? Do you personally favor any of those four views, or something totally different? Is the QBism related at all to the "Quantum Conspiracy" video:<br /><br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc<br /><br />Also, have you heard of this book:<br /><br />http://www.amazon.com/Fields-Color-theory-escaped-Einstein/dp/0473179768<br /><br />I was looking for a layman's intro ... and both the author and Sean Carroll (in another video) touted the benefits of QFT over QM. Is it really all they say, or are they overstating the benefits (they both seem to imply that looking at quantum physics through the lens of QFT resolves a lot of seeming paradoxes). Here's a (short) video from the author:<br /><br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywZ5_YfwihI<br /><br />Sorry to pollute your econ blog with such stuff, but I've been interested in this topic recently.Tom Brownhttp://www.google.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6837159629100463303.post-43896728337584458532015-01-23T12:18:13.840-08:002015-01-23T12:18:13.840-08:00Wait, a rook on every square is impossible? I thou...Wait, a rook on every square is impossible? I thought a bishop on every square was impossible. You can't have four black-square bishops on the board for example. Wait, I'm a little fuzzy actually, if you get your pawn to the other side, could you get two black bishops (i.e. trade the pawn, presumably on a black square, into a lost bishop?)Tom Brownhttp://www.google.comnoreply@blogger.com