Hélio Steven

“Mechanism design takes up Hume's challenge by designing games in which the knaves to whom power is delegated are treated as players. The checks in the constitution are the rules of the game. These are used to prevent a player going off the rails in situations that the designer can effectively monitor and evaluate. However, it is the controls that are more important, since these apply to decisions that the designer can't monitor, or doesn't know how to evaluate. To get the players to act in accordance with the designer's aims rather than their own in such situations, it is necessary that the payoffs of the game be carefully chosen to provide the right incentives.”
― Ken Binmore, Natural Justice

“Wild cognition, it seems, has (literally) no time for the filing cabinet.”
― Andy Clark

“The great value of the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm is the way it helps us understand how what once was "noise" (e.g., unselected-uncorrelated variation) can become new "signal" under changing circumstances.”
― Terrence Deacon

“When playing an outer-circle game as though it were an inner-circle game, the players will sometimes happen to coordinate on an equilibrium of the outer-circle game. The group will then have stumbled upon an equilibrium selection device for the outer circle game. This device consists of the players behaving as though they were constrained by the rules of the inner-circle game, when the rules by which they are actually constrained are those of the outer circle game.”
― Ken Binmore, Natural Justice