Category Archives: Rationality

Benjamini and Mossel’s 2000 Account: Sensitivity of Voting Schemes to Mistakes and Manipulations

Posted on November 10, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Here is a popular account by Itai Benjamini and Elchanan Mossel from 2000 written shortly after the 2000 US presidential election. Elchanan and Itai kindly agreed that I will publish it here,  for the first time, 20 years later!  I … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Games, Probability, Rationality | Tagged , | 6 Comments

To cheer you up in difficult times 6: Play Rani Sharim’s two-player games of life, read Maya Bar-Hillel presentation on catching lies with statistics, and more.

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Sorry for the long blog silence. In this post I wish to give a few links each of which probably deserves a full post. I will start with Rani Sharim’s two-player variants of John Conway’s game-of-life Here is a web-page … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Games, Rationality | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Game Theory – on-line Course at IDC, Herzliya

Posted on March 29, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Game theory, a graduate course at IDC, Herzliya; Lecturer: Gil Kalai; TA: Einat Wigderson,  ZOOM mentor: Ethan. Starting Tuesday March 31, I am giving an on-line course (in Hebrew) on Game theory at IDC, Herzliya (IDC English site; IDC Chinese … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Economics, Games, Rationality, Teaching | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Is it Legitimate/Ethical for Google to close Google+?

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Gil Kalai

Update April 2, 2019: the links below are not working anymore.  Google Plus is a nice social platform with tens of millions participants. I found it especially nice for scientific posts, e.g. by John Baez, Moshe Vardi, or about symplectic … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Open discussion, Rationality | Tagged | 11 Comments

Fix a Horse Race…

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Gil Kalai

GK (2019): Can you base world economy on horse races? Here is an old unpublished draft from 2008 that I did not complete, which was  inspired by the  economic crisis at that time. (It also felt a little over the … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Games, Rationality, Taxi-and-other-stories | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

An Interview with Yisrael (Robert) Aumann

Posted on June 15, 2018 by Gil Kalai

I was privileged to join Menachem Yaari and Sergiu Hart in interviewing Yisrael Aumann.  The interview is in Hebrew. It is an initiative of the Israel Academy of Sciences and the Humanities. For our non Hebrew speakers here is in … Continue reading →

Posted in Academics, Games, Geometry, Rationality | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Layish

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Gil Kalai

This story is implicitly referred to in the 2008 opening post of this blog. ———– It was high time to raise the level of the discussion, I thought. Princeton, Fall 1995. We were a group of mathematicians at the IAS … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Games, Mathematics to the rescue, Philosophy, Rationality, Sport, Taxi-and-other-stories | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

שינוי 2015 – שאלה לנתניהו

Posted on March 7, 2015 by Gil Kalai

בנימין נתניהו, מדוע פרקת את הממשלה ערב מאבק גורלי בנושא קיומי עם נשיא ארצות הברית   זה לא מסתדר העניין הזה: זה הרי חוסר אחריות נוראי לפרק את הממשלה ממש לפני עימות מכריע על נושא קיומי, אז מה הסיבה לכך זה כמו … Continue reading →

Posted in Elections 2015, Rationality | Tagged | 12 Comments

Ehud Friedgut: Blissful ignorance and the Kahneman-Tversky paradox

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Gil Kalai

Tversky, Kahneman, and Gili Bar-Hillel (WikiPedia). Taken by Maya Bar-Hillel at Stanford, summer 1979.   The following post was kindly contributed by Ehud Friedgut. During the past week I’ve been reading, and greatly enjoying Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant book “Thinking fast … Continue reading →

Posted in Guest blogger, Rationality | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Another Forgotten Bet: Is Don Zagier About to Owe Me 1000 Shekels For The Proof of the ABC Conjecture?

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Gil Kalai

      Like everybody else I heard with great interest the news about the attempted solution of the ABC conjecture by Shinichi Mochizuki. (See, e.g.,  here, here, here, and here.) I did not think that this has much to with me … Continue reading →

Posted in Number theory, Rationality | Tagged , , | 9 Comments