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12/2011
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11/2011
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10/2011
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09/2011
Noam Chomsky to me
show details 2:22 AM (12 hours ago)
I appreciate your dilemmas, and wish I could help. But I doubt that anyone can. These are the kinds of problems we just have to work through ourselves.
Noam Chomsky
-----Original Message-----
From: Justin sun (by way of Noam Chomsky <>) [mailto:chaoransun@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, September 12, 2011 12:14 PM
To: Noam Chomsky
Subject: A non-academâ ‹ic question on academic life
Dear professor Chomsky
I'm a postgraduate student in China. As a student who dreamed of
being a theorist, I really want to know how a great thinker like you
succeed in maintaining such a noble pursuit in a world full of
irrational passion and vagary.
I know it's a pseudo question to ask what kind of life is the most
meaningful, but occasionally, I still vex myself by asking why
I'm bothering to spend most of my time wrestling with those opaque
abstract theory. I used to believe that a man's most "wonderful life"
should be all about austerity, abstinence, contemplating on those
fundamental questions relentlessly(Wittgenstein did figure largely in
me), but is it? Why even a genius like Wittgenstein constantly suffer
from serious depression and manifest a proneness to commit suicide?
I always want to be smarter and better(I don't know whether they're the
same), but always ended up finding myself disconnected with other
people as before. Is it just a Sisyphean task or merely due to my
hopele
06
08/2011
Tim Madigan on logic, language and mysticism in the life of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.
One of the foremost philosophers of the Twentieth Century and the scion of one of the wealthiest families in Austria, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) went to Cambridge in 1911 specifically to study with Bertrand Russell, the best-known logician of the time. At first a protégé of Russell’s, he later broke with him over the claim that mathematics can be firmly grounded in logic. The two for a time shared an interest in mysticism, but Russell seemed to ignore the underlying mystical nature of Wittgenstein’s first book, and the only one published in Wittgenstein’s lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), for which Russell wrote an introduction. Russell was not the only one so blinkered. The Vienna Circle movement likewise interpreted Wittgenstein’s work to be saying that all of nature could be reduced to propositions. “A proposition”, Wittgenstein wrote, “is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of reality as we think it to be.” The Vienna Circle interpreted this to mean that all metaphysical statements were strictly nonsense, since to them they were non-propositional – and if any claim could not be expressed in terms that were verifiable, then such a claim is meaningless and should be ignored. Followers of this view became known as Logical Positivists, and credited their origin to Wittgenstei
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06/2011
13
12/2010
Robert E. Lucas, Jr.
December 9, 1988
Economists have an image of practicality and worldliness not shared by physicists and poets. Some economists have earned this image. Others--myself and many Of my colleagues here at Chicago--have not. I’m not sure whether you will take this as a confession or a boast, but we are basically story-tellers, creators of make-believe economic systems. Rather than try to explain what this story-telling activity is about and why I think it is a useful--even an essential activity, I thought I would just tell you a story and let you make of it what you like.
My story has a point: I want to understand the connection between changes in the money supply and economic depressions. One way to demonstrate that I understand this connection--I think the only really convincing way--would be for me to engineer a depression in the United States by manipulating the U.S. money supply. I think I know how to do this, though I’m not absolutely sure, but a real virtue of the democratic system is that we do not look kindly on people who want to use our lives as a laboratory. So I will try to make my depression somewhere else.
The location I have in mind is an old-fashioned amusement park--roller coasters, fun house, hot dogs, the works. I am thinking of Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh, where I lived when my children were at the optimal age as amusement park companions - a beautiful, turn-of-the-century place on
08
12/2010
（后天讲这篇综述文章，但可恶的网吧的电脑不能用Word和PowerPoint，就先把讲稿打在这里吧。）
原文链接在此
背景知识：
Ancient questions ask anew:
What's the driving forces behind macoreconomic phenomena：unemployment, inflation and growth?
How do they affect them?
Neo-Classical Macroeconomic Paradigm：
Robert E. Lucas, Jr(1972): Expectations and the Neutrality of Money （链接在此）
Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott(1982): Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations （链接在此）
Lucas Island Model illustrates the elegance and convenience of Rational Expectations in a context of a general equilibrium model to generate business cycles, which has become standardized in today's macroeconomics.
However, what the model arrive at is, at best, occasional highs and lows, far from economic boom and bust in reality. Afterwards Lucas made some modification in attempt to improve this senario with only limited success.
Although Lucas had laid a sound foundation，his framework doesn’t seem to be operational without introduction of further details. It's Lucas's student Prescott and Prescott's student Kydland that c
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11/2010
昨天又和311的同学继续了我们恐怖电影系列活动和恐怖电影workshop。收获如下：
1.整个电影就是一个交叠时代博弈（overlapping generations game），并且正好达到一个均衡（离散的看，对应动力系统里的周期轨迹，陷入周期的过程可以看成一次粘合映射）。
2.影片隐含的假定女主角周期性的回忆起和忘记上一期轮回的片段经历，而关键的经历，即出车祸那段自始至终在车祸之前没有回忆起来。
也就是说，电影给人的无法逃脱的命运只是一个幻觉。因为女主角自己的思维本身就被设为周期性的了，而不是对上一期经历具有充分的记忆性。否则，所谓的死循环将会被打破，至少完美记忆下，主人公可以不断尝试新的策略。
有人说这部电影描画了Jess欺骗了死神后，如Sisyphus一般陷入了一个无休止的炼狱（参考百度百科，于此），但问题是对于一个只有不完全的上一期记忆的人，无限的惩罚有什么意义呢？
或者说，惩罚一个会忘记惩罚的人有什么意义呢？
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11/2010
