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FLengyel's comments

FLengyel | 10 years ago | on: The Hardest Logic Puzzle: A step-by-step guide to true, false, and random

I heard that Norman Steenrod was pacing back and forth in Fine Hall thinking about this puzzle, until he solved it. This was before it was attributed to Boolos, according to my sources. The author might have been Mark Kac, or it might have been communicated to Steenrod through Mark Kac, I was told.

FLengyel | 10 years ago | on: Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term

Structured procrastination appears analogous to the second-price auction, in which the winner of an auction pays the second-highest bid. This strategy leads the bidders to bid the true value of the auctioned item. One proof of this assertion can be found in the solution to an exercise in Game Theory Evolving: A Problem-Centered Introduction to Modeling Strategic Interaction (Second Edition), by Herbert Gintis.

It appears that structured procrastination is a two-player game that pits the present self against the time-inconsistent hyperbolically discounted future self. The success of this strategy depends on accurately ranking more important things to do. Presumably the rank of the second-most important thing accurately reflects its hyperbolically discounted value far enough in the future to avoid time inconsistency. An assumption seems to be that most important or interesting thing to do now is generally important or interesting for the wrong reason. Also, if the thing I happen to be doing isn't that important, the thing I should be doing can't be that much more important either.

FLengyel | 10 years ago | on: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

This is correct. In retrospect my math Ph.D. was a waste of time. There have been proposals over the years on how to address the overabundance of PhDs. One approach seems to have been widely and independently adopted: advise those responsible for easing out the exploited to read Erving Goffman's On Cooling the Mark Out: Some aspects of adaptation to Failure [1, 2].

1. http://www.tau.ac.il/~algazi/mat/Goffman--Cooling.htm

2. http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/10/31/cooling-the-...

FLengyel | 10 years ago | on: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

I left after being continually relegated to low-academic value technical support work for established academics. Last year I turned down four opportunities to participate in NSF grants, and this year three so far. It is impossible to advance in an academic career on the basis of the technical skills you used to help your colleagues. Academia is winner-take-all. I decided it was pointless to compound my losses by supporting the winners.

FLengyel | 10 years ago | on: Arrow's impossibility theorem

I wrote about a linear programming proof of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem due to Rakesh Vohra and his collaborators in a series of posts, starting with http://deniallogic.blogspot.com/2015/04/transitivity.html and ending with a proof of Arrow's theorem in http://deniallogic.blogspot.com/2015/05/arrows-theorem.html. The point was to fill in enough details that, for me, were missing from the paper [1].

1. Jay Sethuraman, Teo Chung Piaw, and Rakesh V. Vohra. Integer Programming and Arrovian Social Welfare Functions. Mathematics of Operations Research Vol. 28, No. 2, May 2003, pp. 309–326.

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