Saturday, June 22, 2013

Could any substitute for G-d work as well?


I was an agnostic until I served 200 burritos to over 270 people and had 12 left over. And no, I'm not asking anyone to believe me - I've paid to serve the homeless 2000 meals each week for 17 years, as have countless others. In that time I've had at least 50 people living in my home for free. And there aren't any Atheists who do what I do, because its only easier than it looks when you simply "invoke" G-d; some external energy enters the system. The problem is that millions of "double-blind" (although uncontrolled) experiments have been conducted, and (I believe) no substitute for G-d has ever been found. Edit Bio


Instead of asking pysicists and magicians about miracles, and atheists about the existence of G-d, we might find some more interresting conundrums for those atheists if we searched among econometricians and sociologists.  Eventually we'll find that the amount of energy required to achieve certain beneficient outcomes is simply unavailable in this Universe.

A long time ago I asked some microeconomists to reconcile Shannon's Law regarding entropy in communications networks of bidders, and their confusion led me to suspect that n-dimensional extensions of the Pareto-type representations common in microeconomic pedagogy were impossible, and that even 20+ bidder representations are so fraught with error (at any common frequency of bids) one wonders how anyone buys or sells anything without far more errors than we experience, or that Shannon's Law anticipates.

Clearly something is happening.  Now it's likely I'm applying Shannon's Law incorrectly.  It is more likely, however, that no economist really understands what happens when manny bidders and sellers engage in simultaneous transactions for many goods.  Whether we use outcry bidding and fiat money or more subtle models of internal representations of clusters of objects and cliques of transactors, so many more decisions are made for us than by us I think before we even pretend to tackle the G-d problem we Ants might want to know a little more about the Farm.

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