Game Theory
So I haven't updated for a while. I think I was perhaps a bit ambitious to think I could make a meaningful entry every day. I either need to rapidly increase the speed at which I can produce an entry, or I need to make them less frequently. Part of the issue is unbalanced work weeks, but anyway. On with the content.
So one thing I find interesting in Game Theory. I'm talking about things like the Prisoner's Dilemma, Pascal's Wager. They can be applied to all sorts of situations wherein you are uncertain about the state of one particular function. For example, you could apply it to the weather raining or not raining. Then your choices are wear rain appropriate clothes, or not. Ideally you want to only wear rain appropriate clothes when it's raining, but it comes down to what will bother you more, wearing rain clothes when you don't need them, or getting soaked in your normal clothes.
The other situation where they are interesting is when you're relatively sure of one of the states, but not certain, but the payoff for being correct is small or insignifcant compared to being wrong. For example, funding some unlikely to work research but for a defense purpose. Funding the research and having it pay off is huge, Funding the research for no pay off is not ideal, but on the other side, not funding the research and not having it pay off achieves nothing, but not funding and having it succeed is disasterous. Other situations turn up in social contexts as well.
I'll expand on this more later when I can actually draw some in here, it's too awkward to talk about them without