Posted 10 Oct 2012 / 0
The Huffington Post “Ayn Rand and Modern Politics” What I really appreciate about this post is its very simple brand of analysis. It asks a simple question and employs a clear methodology to objectively understand a phenomenon (in this case, the appeal of Ayn Rand to conservatives). Talk about a job of social construction: the Read More
A Minor Post, Behavior, Belief, Carrying Capacity, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Economics, Ethics, Game Theory, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Religion, Social Norms, System Stability, Web
Posted 06 Oct 2012 / 0
The Chronicle of Higher Education “The Marketplace in Your Brain” I think that this article suggests that much of economics is not much of a science. Faced with new information, mainstream economics has failed to update its models of how the world works. Doing so would make economics akin to physics or medicine or evolutionary Read More
A Minor Post, Belief, Economics, Emotion, Evolutionary Psychology, Game Theory, Neuroscience, Psychological Adaptation, Psychology, Religion, Social Networks, Social Norms
Posted 20 Sep 2012 / 0
CreationRevolution “If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?” It is striking how this reaction lacks any self-consciousness. Research like that referred to in this post is a potential means of understanding how religions and their particular constructed righteousness (in other words their morals, what they believe ought to be) can succeed.
A Minor Post, Altruism, Cooperation, Creationism, Cultural Evolution, Game Theory, Punishment, Web
Posted 20 Sep 2012 / 0
The Society Pages “Progressing from game theory to agent based modelling to simulate social emergence” This is a nice albeit pretty choppy explanation for why we should not listen to orthodox/traditional game theorists. The only argument I see missing here is that game theory relies on the assumption of a well-mixed population: even the Prisoner’s Read More
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Emergence, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Individual-based Models, Spatially Explicit Modeling, Web
Posted 20 Sep 2012 / 0
Public Library of Science ONE “Evolving Righteousness in a Corrupt World” In the race to build the next over-simplified model of cooperative dynamics, it will be interesting to see how the media runs with this one. Is this a “scientists discover the evolutionary rationale for honorable police” moment? I think it is important to take Read More
A Minor Post, Altruism, Articles, Cooperation, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Punishment, Social Networks, System Stability
Posted 19 Sep 2012 / 0
The Chronicle of Higher Education “To the Trickster Go the Spoils” I really appreciate that Freeman Dyson acknowledges so clearly in this article that the fact that he has found a deceitful solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma does not warrant radically shifting our understanding of human cooperation. The IPD and other game theory constructs Read More
A Minor Post, Altruism, Cooperation, Evolutionary Modeling, Fluidity of Knowledge, Game Theory, Reciprocity, Web
Posted 16 Aug 2012 / 0
Game Theory Icons These are pretty clever. I have not walked my way through them yet, but they use arrows to show the relative gradient of payoff for each player, and a little blue circle to represent Nash equilibrium (if any) for the game. What I have not yet figured out with these is whether Read More
A Minor Post, Game Theory, Information Design
Posted 17 Jul 2012 / 0
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “Heterogeneous networks do not promote cooperation when humans play a Prisoner’s Dilemma“
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Game Theory, Social Networks
Posted 28 Jun 2012 / 1
Last summer I discussed a paper by Rand and Nowak that explored the dynamics of antisocial punishment in groups composed of cooperators, defectors, and loners playing a public goods game. In a conventional public goods game, at least some players must make a contribution in order to reap group reward. Cooperators make that contribution and Read More
A Major Post, Altruism, Articles, Cooperation, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Punishment
Posted 27 Jun 2012 / 0
Theory, Evolution, and Games Group “Evolution of ethnocentrism in the Hammond and Axelrod model“
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Social Networks, Web
