Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Brilliant Madness

This comes from one of my favorite movies, A Beautiful Mind. John Nash came up with the Nash Equilibrium, which I learned about last year in my 300 level Econ class. His works today are used in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations, and have provided insight into today’s market economics, computing, artificial intelligence, accounting and military theory. The funny thing is that he had schizophrenia, and most people thought him crazy.



Sometimes you look at what people do or say and it just doesn’t make sense to you. It just doesn’t. But you can’t always see things from their perspective. One of the things you learn in Economics is that people do everything for a reason. The hardest part in convincing someone or in just understanding them is figuring out why they act how they do, and what reasons they have for it. Sometimes those reasons are wrong or perhaps non-existent, but to those people they are as real as anything else.

So when someone doesn’t act like you think they should, or does something that just doesn’t make sense, you have to try and see what reasons they might have for doing it, and then you can change them.

4 comments:

  1. that was a thought-provoking blog post. Perhaps we are too rash in judging people. Thanks for sharing the movie. I loved that movie. I think we are all a bit crazy.

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  2. Parley - Great post. We all have demons in our lives. The trick is how we handle them.

    Dad Wad

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  3. When you lose your mind you have truly nothing, so just be grateful for your mind!

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  4. brilliant, parl. simply brilliant. and i'm very happy for you that you realize this... 'cause it's KEY. this is something i've learned too.

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