Wednesday, August 22, 2007

You Tube of the Day- Why War is Rational

Robert J. Aumann talk about Game Theory in the Middle East;


There are two approaches to cancer. One is clinical. You have, say, breast cancer. What should you do? Surgery? Radiation? Chemotherapy? Which chemotherapy? How much radiation? Do you cut out the lymph nodes? The answers are based on clinical tests, simply on what works best. You treat each case on its own, using your best information. And your aim is to cure the disease, or to ameliorate it, in the specific patient before you.

And, there is another approach. You don’t do surgery, you don’t do radiation, you don’t do chemotherapy, you don’t look at statistics, you don’t look at the patient at all. You just try to understand what happens in a cancerous cell. Does it have anything to do with the DNA? What happens? What is the process like? Don’t try to cure it. Just try to understand it. You work with mice, not people. You try to make them sick, not cure them.

Louis Pasteur was a physician. It was important to him to treat people, to cure them. But Robert Koch was not a physician, he didn’t try to cure people. He just wanted to know how infectious disease works. And eventually, his work became tremendously important in treating and curing disease....

If you want peace, prepare for war...If you shout peace, peace, peace all the time, you will not get peace...If we sell our Arab cousins on the proposition that we're intending to stay here, then we'll get peace


Watch it especially if you're in Middle East.

Related;
On the Applicability of Game Theory in Economics: A Survey
Nobel Lecture

What Is Game Theory Trying to Accomplish?
Risk Aversion in the Talmud
Agreeing to Disagree
Game Theory in The New Palgrave Game Theory,
An Interview with Robert Aumann, Interviewed by Sergiu Hart, Macroeconomic Dynamics

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