Comparative Advantage for the Meek

Often I feel (*cough* KNOW *cough*) as if there are people who vastly, vastly outperform and there's a sort of existential "What's the use?"-moment.

The Law of Comparative Advantage is useful for such moments.  I'm nowhere near being a competent mathematician, but there are still opportunities.

The other thing that I find encouraging is that mathematics is not an ever expanding sphere where the discoveries take place at the edge.

It's more like swiss cheese:  there are little holes left all around to fill in.

Characterization in Stories: Fruits Basket v. Maria-sama Ga Miteru

Ugh, I'm going to talk about anime.  MY APOLOGIES.

I was talking to a friend about character-driven stories.  And, I think there are two main differentiating components: the first is 2D v. 3D 'fullness', and the second element is maturity of the characters.  You can have one and not the other, but they are neither supplementary nor complementary.  I have seen stories that only got the character 'fullness' right, but still had a good story.  And I've seen stories that got the 'maturity' right, but I wouldn't consider their characters to be 'full'.

Maria-sama Ga Miteru would be an example of an anime that I would say the maturity outmatched the 'fullness'.  The characters are...simple...at least in the sense of the sort of things that this show is concerned about.  Seriously, dear lord, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an episode about "The Horror of the Tea Kettle That Wouldn't Heat Up!"  And they would devolve into ridiculous and inane banter about the first world problem of their tea not being properly heated.

You think I'm exaggerating.  Watch the show and tell me I'm exaggerating.  If anything I think I'm understating it.

Either way, the kind of trivializing details that they deal with makes the characters highly unbelievable to myself.  However, the protagonist does definitely grow (not physically, of course).  There wasn't one point in the series where you could point at, where the character gives some dramatic speech like in most 2D characterizations found in some animes, and then they're all of sudden a 'better person'.  This was a tad more realistic, and you could see, over time, that she had mellowed and became quite the lady.  Maison Ikkoku did a great job of this as well.  In order to do something like that, you need to have--and Maria-sama did have--great characterization.  It was a character-driven story and the maturation element was done superbly (even if I do still think the characters at any one instance were somewhat flat).

Fruits Basket I would characterize in the opposite way.  I wouldn't say that their characters were more 'full' than Maria-sama (because the maturation does make characters more 'full'), but the 'fullness' of their characters was much more than the 'maturation' of their characters.  Mainly because characters matured when Tohru would play her junior psychoanalyst role for the episode and change one of the other characters in the course of a single episode.  This is what I mean by the maturation being 'unrealistic'.  However, the loving character of Tohru did, I think, make her 'more full'.

If this makes any sense...

Rocking Chair Test.....Fallacy

{How the "Rocking Chair Test" ends up as a failure w/me due to vidya.}

As I've mentioned here, there's something I find uneasy in the rocking chair test...pun unintended.  I guess the ultimate argument for the rocking chair test is some sort of performative contradiction argument.  Something like saying, "Well, if you feel uneasy about it, that's regret, and also just confirms the Rocking Chair Test."  But, something about this doesn't feel quite right.  When I think about my vidya past, while I'm thinking about it, it is pleasurable, there is no tinge of regret.

To me, the real problem with this conflation is what really is 'happiness'.

Applied v. Pure mathematics

I used to be having this huge internal battle between whether I wanted to do pure or applied Mathematics.  And, a long while back I met a while by the name of Robert with whom I discussed this at length.  And, I gave a lot of arguments that Hardy would've been proud of, but in the end, he ended up convincing me by noting that, "All applied Mathematics today is pretty pure, anyways."

And given a lot of the theoretical considerations that goes on, and the historical fact that a lot of Mathematics comes from Physics, and not the other way around as mathematicians would have you believe, gives some credence to this idea.

Plus, I did read Hardy's "Apology for the Mathematician".  He makes a lot of good points intellectual curiosity, professional pride, ambition are the dominant incentives (but no mention of Poincaré's dictum, "Mathematics for Mathematics sake", or of Turán's motto, "Mathematics is a strong fortress.").  The majority of his points on the aesthetics of Mathematics relate to an analogy to the arts:  Artists -> patterns, Painter -> shapes, Poet -> words, Mathematician -> ideas (Hardy holds a very Platonic view of the world, things are of ideal forms, and uses this as a huge justification throughout the entire essay).  However, this does not seem to deny the capability of applied mathematicians.  Moreover, and finally, my main point of contention is Hardy famously saying pure Mathematics is 'useless'.  This to me seems to be the crux of the matter between pure and applied Mathematics.  In particular, Hardy uses this as justification that Mathematics can 'do no harm'.  And uses the Mathematics of number theory and relativity not yet having uses for warfare as examples.

Which, we all know what happened to those two examples (HINT:  CRYPTOGRAPHY AND THE ATOM BOMB GUISE).....

Logic/(video?) Games: Do they have a cognitive effect?

Somewhere in this interview:

The guy mentions how just doing simple arithmetic problems influences depression rates.

I was wondering about the influence of logic games in general.  Since--as I noted in my bs knowledge of neuroscience back here--how the neocortex overlays all of the behaviorist bs.  The idea would be that logic games enhance the PFC, and that in turn enhances executive control and a whole host of other functions.

Which leads to another idea I'm kind of apprehensive to...do videogames have a cognitive effect?

I mean, in general, the people I know who play shittons of videogames...tend to not be altogether dumb people.

BS Attempt at Neuroscience

ARE YOU READY FOR ME STEALING STUFF FROM STUFF I'VE WRITTEN ELSEWHERE?

Anyways, this will hopefully fit into my next post...

I was into behaviorism for a long time, and I would use it quite often for self-motivational schemes (get myself to do exercises or read or etc.). But then I realized the hard way about the behaviorist regression problem (if X reinforces Y, and you use X to do Y, then problem is the same: you now have to reinforce X instead of Y (or if it naturally reinforcing, have some other scheme Z to keep X in check, and then Z has to be properly reinforced)). I realized it really wasn't working, although I might have had short term successes, it was no different than the yoyoing short term successes I had before implementing ridiculous behaviorist schemes.

So then I got off my high horse thinking the cognitive revolution was a bunch of bs and that Skinner was a God and started reading Chomsky's critique of Verbal Behavior, finally understood why the cognitive revolution took place and why all this fuzzy therapeutic nonsense is actually beneficial because...

The key idea I form around all of this is the triune model of the brain. To some extent, I already alluded to this in a previous long post. And I'll be brief because I know you're all a pretty smart crowd here, so this is more for my own benefit but...you have the brain stem-cerebellum which regulates hormones and base instincts/pleasures like eating and sex and what-not. The limbic system is the next layer on top of this, and for my purposes of thought here, regulates emotions, and reinforcement schedules, and basic learning and what-not. The neocortex is on top of that and controls our rational thought and interpretation of events and language and what-not.

The way I think of it now, is that the Behaviorist model hooks up with the brain-stem/limbic system. And the reason it can't explain where certain other reinforcement comes from--or the inability of it to explain cognitive reframing (a.k.a. "being positive")--is in part what I described of part of the problem with the regression problem above.

Therefore, there's actually something to be said about the importance of interpretation in motivating one self and all these 'fuzzy' sort of concepts (which is why I was so apprehensive to them, and I'll get back to this IN MORE DETAIL IN LATER POSTS (aside from what I've already said in that old post)).

Marriage

I was reading Strang's Applied Mathematics the other day.  He got into talking about the "Wedding Problem".  Right before this, he was talking about another problem you can apply some game theory to called "Escape".  He then likened the winning strategy of the "Wedding Problem" to the winning strategy to "Escape".

Conclusion?  I shall directly quote from Strang, I swear to you, no joke, this is printed in the Applied Mathematics book, I am not paraphrasing it, this is verbatim:

"Inside the wedding game, the real game is Escape."

Genius.  This guy is fucking genius.