We suck at statistics. Statisticians suck at statistics. It’s been 50 years since Tversky/Kahnemann’s paper on the belief in the law of small numbers. 50 years. Another failure of statistical intuition, to not realize just how long we’ve been living with knowledge of these results. But why do we suck at statistical intuition? Seems like a poor adaptation, to draw incorrect and incomplete conclusions about the world. It’s likely easier to ask what is different about statistical problems that lead our finely tuned minds into error, where before (or otherwise) they have strong functional bases. More generally, under what circumstances…
The problem with socialism is it distracts from the underlying problem. A lot would be solved if we internalized more precisely the difference between Marxism, a philosophy of society, and Communism, a political system of government that seeks to solve the issues Marxist philosophy uncovers. The underlying problem is not going away, and the fact that we believe socialism and communism are poorly constructed, unimaginative and short-term options, potential solutions rather than expressions of the problem, is merely distracting us from that underlying problem.
Here’s the simplest form of that problem, getting progressively more complex: Let’s say all men are…
A cooperative society is one where individuals share values. Either these are extrinsic, we are told to share values given to us by priests, kings, or governments. Or these are intrinsic, where we innately value certain things, and we tend to form groups of people who value the same things to the same extent that we do. Whether this is the value of materials, of labor, or of abstract things like morals, makes no difference. John Locke held that we could know of morals either by inscription, tradition, sense-experience, or revelation, of which he rejected all but sense-experience.
Beyond constitutional…
Might conspiracy theories be the expression of a paradigm shift in our morality, an Enlightenment 2.0?
Conspiracy theories are Veblen goods. Their value goes down with popularity. So to the casual dabbler during the innocent 2000s, they used to be fun and kooky, harmless exercises in pareidolia and synchronicity. Now conspiracies are the mainstream view to explain any phenomenon we don’t like, and that’s taken all the fun out of calling the Queen a reptile, Bush a puppet, and everyone else a cuck. Conspiracy theories attracted two kinds of people, 1) Veblen snobs who enjoyed the feeling of knowing something…
An anarchist’s derivation and solution for the phenomenon of inherent prejudice in the hands of a powerful monopolistic state.
Say P=100. Group A,B, each 50. X=30, where X is a negative quantity like crime. a , b are the proportions of respective populations to crime such that aA + bB = X = 30.
- Suppose a>>b. For instance, a=50%, b=10%. This unfortunately translates into general human psychology, but more damagingly law enforcement, treating each individual of A as having a 50% chance of being X, and every B as having a 10% chance. When instead each individual is either 100%…
We’re a conceited species that is convinced people will want to know what we experience. So we write memoirs and journals and ledgers. We keep records of our deeds, our things, and our thoughts. Most of the time we aren’t aware of our thoughts, or our actions until a pattern emerges and makes itself clear, as Hesse says about finding our calling or vocation — ein Stück Wirklichkeit dasteht und eingreift: A portion of reality presents itself and makes its claim.
Similarly, suddenly a portion of our lived reality presents itself in all its detail, and claims significance, meaning, and…
The traditional view of dogma, such as the Catholic Church’s eternal mission to stamp out scientific progress that undermines its authority, is one that focuses on monopoly power. If I hold all the answers, all the keys, and all the gates, then I control everything. In Hinduism this was the Brahmins controlling knowledge of the Vedas and protecting its secrets. In economics, this is either fairly gotten IPR monopoly power, or ill-gotten monopoly power because of money, like Microsoft, or political corruption, like Reliance. But the fact that power inevitably decays and corrupts eventually doesn’t change the possibility it was…
We are capable of thinking about the possibility of being in a simulation. This thought is made possible by certain experiences that we synthesize with concepts. The experience, for instance, of teleology or grand overarching design, like the idea of our complex social or cognitive behavior following the same sort of pure physics principles of fundamental particles. Most of these are pareidolia, but in many instances we find legitimate parallels between two phenomena that shouldn’t technically be related, like gravity and social networks, or the strong nuclear force and sexual fertilization. While we can cognitively access the possibility that physical…
All the arguments against meritocracy I come across seem to hinge on the idea that every individual has a different starting point and different set of resources helping him over the course of the race. These arguments all, strangely enough, agree with the meritocrats on one thing, that the finish line is clearly established, a fair indicator of the winner (however unfair the circumstances of his victory might be), and an objectively complete measure of race performance. I think it’s just the opposite, that the biggest problem in our quest to build the ideal meritocratic society lies not in the…
We intuitively accept the fact that extraordinary minds will likely operate in strange ways that we will find unrecognizable. In fact it’d be strange if they were recognizable, if Bobby Fischer, Kurt Godel, and Beethoven were all normal human beings the way we are. Unfortunately we have a unidimensional expectation of what this strangeness must look like, and we restrict it to a very specific form in which they are apt to reject social customs and norms of politeness that make no sense contextually. Nonconformity. This is difficult for us to portray without implicitly acknowledging that all of us conformist…
The Pen Of Darkness
A novel insightful exercise to determine the pragmatic difference in intellectual payoff between a novel insight and an obvious fact mistaken for novel insight.
