domdip

Alternatively, the poor quality ensures that only rubes will click through. Why PPC for people who are going to be skeptical anyway?

The TOS is irrelevant if they're elsewhere making diagnostic claims.

This is a fun example. The formula's easy to prove by induction, but discovering it is less obvious and this is an interesting way.

It's the tip of the iceberg though - generatingfunctionology is worth inspecting thoroughly.

Using a meta-study that showed tiny changes (statistical significance is irrelevant here, virtually any intervention could have had that kind of impact) to bolster a handful of anecdotes is pretty silly.

I don't argue that this doesn't help a fraction of people, but the case is pretty weak and the long-term results of tampering with a critical hormone are unknown.

No offense to the author but I've read at least 3 of his articles posted here and they all follow a similar pattern.

Has anyone dug in and figured out how these #s are impacted by MMI?

In the case of law, this is actually way too optimistic - an A-list school in no way guarantees you'll "do all right for yourself" anymore. Horror studies abound of even graduates of the top-5 finding themselves with loads of debt and nothing but very low-paying jobs.

None of these people are starving. They have access to food pantries, soup lines, and other community support. I'm not saying it's a nice life, but people in India and elsewhere are actually starving.

Zerocoin, if it's ever adopted, will go a long way to solving this problem.

Pain treatment is one of the few areas where a placebo actually 'works' (in the sense that it leads to better outcomes than non-treatment). See Pollo et al, "Response expectancies in placebo analgesia and their clinical relevance."

So even if it's full of nonsense, it's not surprising that the book could work (and not just anecdotally). The question is whether this book is any better than a placebo, and anecdotes can't answer that. (I also wonder if it's any better than any other book that would help you cope with psychological stress.)

Yeah "link" is probably too strong because it seems to be in one direction. They apply the informational contexts of physics to a game-theoretic model. Then they show that some stuff is implied in the latter.

They also show that a payoff strategy space has the same form as a test for a Bell inequality. That's the hyped 'link' but IMO it's really weak and not newsworthy in itself.

Care about this paper if you care about thinking about games in the context of assumptions about quantum information. They've arguably come up with a reasonably clean model for that and contradicted a prior result in the process.

If you don't care about that research space then you probably don't want to spend too much time pondering the philosophy of this.

It's not about some players performing better than others.

It's about the game maybe having a better outcome (for everyone) in one case than the other. Maybe it's not surprising that 'extra' information improves the game. But a point of this article (IMO) was to formally show that you could link the notion of 'extra' in physics to 'better' in game theory.

I'm not arguing that this is profound, but it's not completely trivial either.

My interpretation of this for those with a bit of game theory background:

Locality (in physics) can be translated (in game theory) as a constraint on correlated equilibria, by pretty basic observations about Bayesian probability.

Generally in game theory when you lift constraints on correlated equilibria you (weakly) expand the possible Nash equilibria.

So one of their points seems to be that the quantum context (non-locality) allows for more (potentially better) equilibria.

They don't emphasize applications of this, but one of them could be that distributed quantum systems could have better outcomes than distributed systems in the classical setting. (One way to analyze distributed systems is by viewing components as independent actors in a game.)

There is also an identification between payoff functions and Bell inequalities, but I am not sure how profound this is really. It feels more like a technical point. Payoff functions are not terribly fundamental in game theory (compared to equilibria, for instance).