This week is currently the start of 18th grade for me and the other students at UC Irvine, so I thought I might take a moment to review what I’ll be studying this quarter and some plans for the long term.

Study List

This quarter is my first heavy foray into the game theory part of the LPS department. Not only will I be taking the perennial Social Dynamics seminar, but I will also be studying learning in games through a seminar which will be reading The Theory of Learning in Games by Fudenberg and Levine, as well as parts of Strategic Learning and its Limits by H. Peyton Young. Hopefully by the end of the quarter I will be sufficiently caught up in the game theory that might be relevant for future work I’ll be doing.

I am also taking a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and one called Geometry and Spacetime. The first I am taking primarily because I need to fill a requirement, but the second could turn out to be quite interesting. At the very least, the first four weeks or so will be some interesting math.

Future Plans

At this point, I am virtually certain that I will be trying to focus on something in the neighborhood of evolutionary game theory. The field is quite interesting, though I feel quite behind on the literature and current status still. There is a nice mixture of programming, math, and philosophy such that I shouldn’t get bored with it anytime remotely soon.

Over the summer, I also started to introduce myself to topics in philosophy of biology, which tends to crop up a lot in the neighborhood of game theory, probably due to the evolutionary nature of a lot of the work being done around here. Though it may not be the most detailed introduction, I recommend Darwin by Tim Lewens. I gave what I thought was a nice overview of many standard phil-bio topics and their relevance to Darwin’s works.

I also have been working heavily on a paper in game theory considering more in-depth the connections between combinatorial communication and deception that I was introduced to in Lachmann and Bergstrom’s “The disadvantage of combinatorial communication.” Though it is still not properly framed, I have high hopes that it may turn into a paper for my portfolio, which is due in approximately one year.

Having just gotten back from working for CTY and visiting the parents for the last couple weeks, I thought I would write a bit about my CTY experience.

Since I have had virtually no experience working with the age group CTY is targeted at (that is, 7th-10th grade, ages 12-16 roughly), I was rather unsure what to expect. I was hired to be a teaching assistant for a mathematical logic course, which really is supposed to be fast-paced symbolic logic with some mathematical connections from what I understood, so I was confident in the material I would have to explain. The real worry for me was trying to keep everyone interested. Granted, theoretically each of them had chosen the class — no one was taking it to fulfill a requirement or anything. However, as it turned out, that wasn’t exactly the case. Several of the kids were in the class by parental decision, and a couple more had not quite understood the course description, but things seemed to turn out rather well.

CTY is structured so that the kids are in class for about 7 hours a day, 5 days a week for three weeks. Effectively, this works out to a rough correspondence of a day in CTY-land to a week of a college course, meaning that about a semester’s worth of material is covered in three weeks. Although a large majority of the class I was responsible for kept interested and up-to-date on the assigned work quite well, there were others that were a challenge. If I am able to go back in the future, trying to build techniques for keeping people interested is something I will need to focus on a bit more.

Overall, working for CTY was a really good experience for me. I had the opportunity to lecture for a couple days and gained a lot of classroom management experience (in addition to recognizing a number of things on which I need to improve). I am very excited to be able to work there again, though next summer may prove quite difficult since it is the summer during which a lot of portfolio work tends to get done, historically.

Now that I am back in Irvine, I am trying to get down to work on finishing up the two papers that I did not get to complete during the last school year — namely one on Reichenbach’s notion of the a priori and one on some aspects of game theory, deception, and value of information. Hopefully I will be able to finish both before the start of fall quarter.

Edit: I’ve also started reading Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, so I should have some thoughts about that to post soon as well.

So I am still writing papers to hopefully not have to take an incomplete. One class is done, and the other is mostly done, though it seems I need to revise my thesis slightly to be somewhat less ambitious and, as a result, go back and edit and extend the discussion.

I should hopefully have some time to read and post some interesting thoughts beginning again next week.

So I don’t have anything particularly philosophical to write about since I am still in the trenches on papers, but I thought I would give a small personal update.

Soon (as in, within the next week) I will be interviewing for an instructor job teaching mathematical logic to 7th+ graders for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth at their site in Hong Kong for three weeks this summer. Although it would be a ton of work getting prepared to actually be the instructor for the class, I think it would be a lot of fun to get to teach an accelerated logic sequence to a group of bright, motivated students. The course is supposed to cover about a week of sentential logic, a week of quantifier-predicate logic and a week of elementary set theory.

If that falls through, there is still the possibility of working for the Philosophy of Science Association doing a website re-design. I have not heard anything back from that in a little while, so I’m not getting my hopes up. If all else fails, I suppose I’ll be trying to find a local job.