Decoding The Gurus patreon

Decoding Academia #3: (Fogel, 1993) Audio

🕑 Added 2022-01-08 00:07:26 +0000 UTC

Comments

Jeremy Stewart

My £2 patreon subscription was worth it just to hear you two botching the explanation of this so brilliantly. I'm not sure if it was intentional but it really put a smile on my face.

Blake Lever

Totally understand, thanks for all your hard work!

Jason Trock

This was awesome. And it is relevant and important to revisit these topics.. because before you know it you're enjoying a twitter smack down about shiab operators, ludic fallacies, and folding space time which is all fine and good if you're into that sort of erotic elitism - but really if the theory of everything turns out to be discovered by they guy who ostensibly (but demonstrably?) believes that he (or they?) are the most important person that matter -- there are greater ironies than those revealed by Daedalus and Bloom, but not many! No fewer than The Winesteeens would benefit from a lesson plan starting with the Robinson Crusoe economy. When mentoring University students who harbor earnest ambitions of being the chosen few to matriculate AND break into the neo-liberal wage slave economy instead of couch surf at mom and dads, or worse, go get yourself into a PHD program (GHAST!) I regularly recommend courses in decision theory and econometrics. AI, Bayesian inference, Nash equilibriums.. all sound fancy but if you don't have a rubric for how and or why decisions are made you're really missing the point. We are becoming lazy technologists. So keep bringing up the old stuff! Analog is just fine, Really enjoying the podcast, the humor, the brutal honesty, and of course the accents. Keep it real.

Christopher Kavanagh

It is possible and is always on my podcast to do list. But we like to edit before posting on feeds. Trying to get some help to make it happen more smoothly. Sorry!

Matthias Meeta

The Podcaster‘s dilemma is a game with two players (A and B) where each has the option of explaining the prisoner’s dilemma (e) at a given time t. The payoff matrix is as follows: A e ¬e e -10/-10 10/0 B ¬e 0/10 -5/-5 With no coordination between the two, what would the optimal strategy be? Great episode though 🙏🏻

widget

I got an email with the feed URL. Search your mailbox for 'captivate' or 'galaxy brain edition'.

Blake Lever

Sorry if this has been asked already.. Is it possible to post these extras on a pod feed? I know VBW does.. and yes I’m trying to use jealousy as a motivator

widget

I've been going back, listening to unheard eps. https://pca.st/episode/d00c58c4-9380-4f3d-9783-b36acf07a266?t=1731 -- it took him about 30 seconds to describe the prisoner's dilemma, lol.

Ian Steinberg

The best part of your discussion for me started with Chris’s question at 1:26 about the “stupid application” of game theory to evolutionary psychology. My take-away from your discussion is that a one-to-one application of a simple model to a complicated phenomenon is basically “science porn”. Gurus are incentivized to make these types of explanations by competing in the hyper-competitive attention economy and their desire to brand their expertise. Isn’t there the same pressure in academic settings? You end the discussion on a pretty cynical note as well: It is the “sad fate” of grand ideas to be misused when they become popularized. Are you guys making a “casting pearls before swine” argument here? You gave us lots of examples of the misuse of game theory, but no specific good-use applications other than “it’s a really great analogy”. It seems like a damned if you do (apply it boldly and misuse it and make science porn) and damned if you don’t (so many disclaimers it waters down what can be explained too much for translation to public/lay audience) type of theory to me. This dilemma could even be developed into a game theory to answer itself. Should an academic over-simplify or over-contextualize an idea for the public? What kind of Gurus would evolve from an “Iterated Gurus Dilemma”?

Kirsten Greed

Wondering how to convert m4a format to mp3?

Zvi Pardes

I am pretty critical of evolutionary explanations of religion. It's a vastly complex phenomenon over the breadth of history and geography.... boiling it down merely to "enforcer" techniques for moral/socially approved behavior may describe some aspect of it. But it risks a great deal of reductionism (no, I'm not a post-modernist) that ignores religious phenomenology — the "inner" experiential aspect of religion — as well as the role of ritual at a social level. And more. Religion is just much bigger than these models (or their adherents) are willing to contend with.

Lucy

Really love hearing about these famous studies! This one was complicated but I really liked having the challenge of trying to figure out what it’s about. Once my mother decided she was going to be perpetually nice and never get mad ever no matter what. What a bad idea! She got picked on so much she had to abandon her plan…..

Emma

Hehe. No its fine! I totally get its the sort of thing you normally would show in figures :-) And once I got over my initial confusion it was really interesting!!

Guruspod 2

We suck people in with dunking and rants and before you know it you’re stuck in a seminar on some damn obscure topic. Brilliant, really.

Guruspod 2

Glad to hear it! Was a bit worried there bc I knew we struggled a bit. It’s usually the kind of thing one would explain on slides with diagrams and stuff

Emma

You pulled it in in the end though. And I have never heard anyone make the connection before that multiple iterations of the prisoner dilemma = the tragedy of the common. But that totally makes sense.