Rationality quotes time!
The usual rules:
Most of the Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World. An example:
Our World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Explosions, Rising Stars.
Mathematically Literate World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Inflation, Rising Population.
More of these gems, for the lazy:
Our World: Firm’s Meteoric Rise Explained by Daring Strategy, Bold Leadership
Mathematically Literate World: Firm’s Meteoric Rise Explained by Good Luck, Selection Bias
Our World: One Dead in Shark Attack; See Tips for Shark Safety Inside
Mathematically Literate World: One Dead in Tragic, Highly Unlikely Event; See Tips for Something Useful Inside
Our World: Poll Finds 2016 Candidates Neck and Neck
Mathematically Literate World: Poll Finds 2016 Predictions Futile, Absurd
Mathematically and Economically Literate World: Rapid economic growth in India and China create record sales for low marginal cost information goods that achieve cross-cultural appeal by, for example, playing to base pleasures by displaying explosions and beautiful actors.
...By the middle of the seventeenth century it had come to be understood that the world was enclosed in a sea of air, much as the greater part of it was covered by water. A scientist of the period, Francesco Lana, contended that a lighter-than-air ship could float upon this sea, and he suggested how such a ship might be built. He was unable to put his invention to a practical test, but he saw only one reason why it might not work:
". . . that God will never suffer this Invention to take effect, because of the many consequencies which may disturb the Civil Government of men. For who sees not, that no City can be secure against attack, since our Ship may at any time be placed directly over it, and descending down may discharge Souldiers; the same would happen to private Houses, and Ships on the Sea: for our Ship descending out of the Air to the sails of Sea-Ships, it may cut their Ropes, yea without descending by casting Grapples it may over-set them, kill their men, burn their Ships by artificial Fire works and Fire-balls. And this they may do not only to Ships but to great Buildings, Castles, Cities, with such security that they which cast these things down from a height out of
He had predicted modern air warfare in surprisingly accurate detail—with its paratroopers and its strafing and bombing.
Not really relevant, but this seems like an overstatement. Paratroopers and bombing I can see, but strafing doesn't seem to be mentioned, and I'm not aware that using airborne grapples to overturn ships has ever happened (my understanding is that the weight ratios wouldn't cooperate).
He also seems to be predicting that only one side in any given conflict will have airships, and assuming that everyone else will just keep doing what they were doing before instead of developing strategies and technologies to defend against this new threat.
There are tens of thousands of professional money managers. Statistically, a handful of them have been successful by pure chance. Which ones? I don't know, but I bet a few are famous.
The market doesn't care how much you paid for a stock. Or your house. Or what you think is a "fair" price.
Professional investors have better information and faster computers than you do. You will never beat them short-term trading. Don't even try.
The book Where Are the Customers' Yachts? was written in 1940, and most still haven't figured out that financial advisors don't have their best interest at heart.
The low-cost index fund is one of the most useful financial inventions in history. Boring but beautiful.
Highlights from "50 Unfortunate Truths About Investing" by Morgan Housel.
With that in mind I'd like to hear more about why financial advisors don't have our best interests at heart.
In my experience, quite a few money managers generate a lot more fees then they strictly need to. Even some index funds will churn/rebalance more than necessary in order to generate a fee. When you consider the oft-cited statistic that very few managers outperform the market, and add in the fact that many they do eat the entire much of the surplus with fees, it becomes optimal to buy a good index rather than hire a financial adviser.
The problem with hiring advisers of all kinds is that you are hiring someone because they know more than you- which means you run the risk of them using their knowledge to rip you off.
One can become rich through investment through frequent failure and occasional large success
Only provided you have a large initial pool of capital.
If you don't, the first few failures will knock you out at which point you stop playing the game and the future potential large success never gets realized.
When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He wanted "an epistemology," he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear--it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn't matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party.
Example of professing a belief - here, belief is a fashion statement, or something fun to whip out at parties, not a thing that actually constrains anticipation.
I wonder what the story would sound like if told from the perspective of the literary theorist. Perhaps a story about how philosophers like to go on and on about truth and rationality, but when pressed by a relatively intelligent interlocutor, can't even supply you with something as basic as a theory of knowledge?
If one were to fault a philosopher for not being able to generate something basic in that sense, I'd think one would also have to fault physicists for not yet having generated a Theory of Everything. A generalized theory of knowledge would be fundamental within philosophy, but that doesn't equate to being easy to generate, or impossible to work without (if it were, after all, nobody else ought to be able to get any work done without it either.)
I don't know whether an epistemology can be true or false.
That's because "true" or "false" are aspects of maps, and epistemologies aren't maps - they're mapmaking tools.
You don't judge tools based on their truth or falsehood; you judge them based on their usefulness towards a certain purpose.
In humans' case, I think that an epistemology's job is to act as a bridge between our naive map-making and the world - that is, an epistemology's usefulness is measured by how well humans can use it to generate maps of their territory, and how well the maps it generates conform to their territory when read by humans. (Where "territory" can mean something as bare and ephemeral as raw qualia, barring any deeper assertion of the epistemology in question).
It's hard enough to overcome one's own misconceptions without having to think about how to get the resulting ideas past other people's. I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to sell. When I notice something surprising, it's usually very faint at first. There's nothing more than a slight stirring of discomfort. I don't want anything to get in the way of noticing it consciously.
Visit with your predecessors from previous Administrations. They know the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.
I don't like a lot of things he did, but that's the second very good advice I've heard from Rumsfeld. Maybe I need to start respecting his competence more.
The "known knowns" quote got made fun of a lot, but I think it's really good out of context:
"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know."
Also, every time I think of that I try to picture the elusive category of "unknown knowns" but I can't ever think of an example.
I guess "unknown knowns" are the counterpoint to "unknown unknowns" -- things it never occurred to you to consider, but didn't. Eg. "We completely failed to consider the possibility that the economy would mutate into a continent-sized piano-devouring shrimp, and it turned out we were right to ignore that."
We completely failed to consider the possibility that the economy would mutate into a continent-sized piano-devouring shrimp, and it turned out we were right to ignore that.
That's a survivor bias.
Things that we know that we don't know we know? I run into these all the time... last night, for example, I realized that I knew the English word for the little plastic cylinders at the end of a shoelace. (I discovered this when someone asked me what an 'aglet' was.) I'd had no idea.
In every way that people, firms, or governments act and plan, they are making implicit forecasts about the future.
You know what they say - "Asking once will bring you temporary shame, whereas not doing so will bring you permanent shame".
They also say "Answering a question will make you feel superior for a while, whereas not doing so will give you a lifelong sense of superiority".
Scott Aaronson after looking into the JFK assassination conspiracy evidence:
Before I started reading, if someone forced me to guess, maybe I would’ve assigned a ~10% probability to some sort of conspiracy. Now, though, I’d place the JFK conspiracy hypothesis firmly in Moon-landings-were-faked, Twin-Towers-collapsed-from-the-inside territory. Or to put it differently, “Oswald as lone, crazed assassin” has been added to my large class of “sanity-complete” propositions: propositions defined by the property that if I doubt any one of them, then there’s scarcely any part of the historical record that I shouldn’t doubt.
Huh, I didn't know Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan & John Kerry were JFK truthers (for want of a more precise term). That's kind of interesting. (I don't mean to imply that's particularly good evidence for a JFK assassination conspiracy. Scientists, philosophers & politicians are about as good as the rest of us at getting things outside their speciality wrong. I really do just mean that it's mildly interesting.)
That post nicely demonstrates some useful heuristics. Point 11 = "Hug the Query". Point 12 = "Proving Too Much". Point 14 = "Burdensome Details". Point 18 = "cock-up before conspiracy". Point 20 uses a rule of thumb I recognize but haven't seen named anywhere yet: beware of rejecting a reasonably complete, orthodox theory in favour of a contrarian theory merely because contrarians claim to have piled up an assortment of anomalous "details that don’t add up in the official account".
Working with a top secret clearance has made me much more aware of how different hardball power reality is than it is presented. Just as one might consider a predilection towards conspiracies a bias, I think I came in to that job with a bias AGAINST conspiracies. I liked believing the world is a fair place where all sorts of tricky evil secret stuff "just wouldn't be done."
I now think (> 50% probability) that the bulk of society is coddled in a belief that things are fair and the world works in a warmish fuzzish way, but that the interactions especially between states and non-state power organizations (terrorists in common usage) is essentially without rules. If you can concieve of a way to get an advantage, it will be R&D'd and if it is workable it will be used.
I figure with just above 50% probability JFK was lone-assasinated purely on the basis that in 50 years with so much attention something would have broken, probably, if there was more to break. It would not matter to me much if it turned out to be a conspiracy of some sort, even if it was covered up, it would be par for the course in my current world view, either way.
Meaning I would be careful imputing too much superiority to myself over Russel, Sagan and/or Kerry purely on the basis of thinking JFK was lone-assasinated.
...Mike nodded. He wasn't really surprised, though. One of the things he'd come to learn since the Ring of Fire, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, was that if the ancestors of twentieth-century human beings didn't do something that seemed logical, it was probably because it wasn't actually logical at all, once you understood everything involved. So it turned out that such notorious military numbskulls as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Phil Sheridan, Stonewall Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman and all the rest of them hadn't actually been idiots after all. It was easy for twentieth-century professors to proclaim loftily that Civil War generals had insisted on continuing with line formations despite the advent of the Minié ball-armed rifled musket because the dimwits simply hadn't noticed that the guns were accurate for several hundred yards. When—cluck; cluck—they should obviously have adopted the skirmishing tactics of twentieth-century infantry.
But it turned out, when put to a ruthless seventeenth-century Swedish general's test in his very rigorous notion of field exercises, that those professors of a later era had apparently never tried to stand their ground when caval
All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren't dumb. But they come from a background -- law and politics -- where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.
What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don't is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there's no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.
The most important professions in the modern world may be the most reviled: advertiser, salesperson, lawyer, and financial trader. What these professions have in common is extending useful social interactions far beyond the tribe-sized groups we were evolved to inhabit (most often characterized by the Dunbar number). This commonly involves activities that fly in the face of our tribal moral instincts.
Interestingly, advertiser, lawyers, and financial traders all have in common that they are agents who play zero-sum or almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone. People who represent big interests in these games are compensated well, because of the logic of the game: so much is at stake that you want to have the best person representing you, so these people's services are bid up. But there is still the feeling that the game is wasteful, though perhaps unavoidably so.
Also, problematically for first sentence, I don't think many people would necessarily come up with the four professions named, especially "advertiser" and "salesperson", if asked to name the most important professions in the modern world, and some important professions, like "scientist", are widely valorized, while others, like "engineer", are at the least not reviled.
Interestingly, advertiser, lawyers, and financial traders all have in common that they are agents who play zero-sum or almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone.
Not nearly as much as you think, the game is in a sense locally zero sum, but it greatly benefits the wider system if the right person wins. Hint: consider what would happen if court cases or the resource allocation problems implicit in stock trading were decided by coin flips.
Also contrast with warriors, they really do engage in almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone else, and their game is much less optimized to increase the odds of the right side wining, and yet they're generally considered valiant heroes. The reason being that they were necessary even in the tribal period, so our instincts have evolved to take them into account.
Note: When treating mental patients who think they’re Samson, cut their hair before putting them in the locked ward.
Lovecraft sipped his tea, obviously framing his answer carefully. "One doesn't have to believe in Santa Claus to recognize that people will exchange presents at Christmas time. One doesn't have to believe in Yog Sothoth, the Eater of Souls, to realize how people will act who do hold that belief. It is not my intent, in any of my writings, to provide information that will lead even one unbalanced reader to try experiments that will result in the loss of human life."
— Wilson and Shea, Illuminatus!
How is this a net improvement in holding only patients who are actually insane?
A patient who believes they are Samson inaccurately believes they have a weakness: their hair being cut. By cutting their hair, you trigger their imaginary weakness, which decreases the amount that they resist, and thus you do not have to pin them down with orderlies.
Think of PCP-driven berserkers flipping cars with their mere, ordinary human strength, fully unleashed without regard to injury or death, and you've got some notion of the problem posed by a delusional man who thinks he's Samson.
Presumably in the same spirit, when treating mental patients who think they're Superman, expose them to glowing yellow rocks. That said, does this sort of thing actually work in real life?
This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. <...> Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.
Symbolically, however…
The crisis she faced was a crisis in confidence, nothing more, nothing less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see which way the sand would spill. She had made a resolution to act as if she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything else, and paradoxically, they had all started believing with her. It was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she resolved never to forget again.
To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over men.
Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/26/welcome-to-the-era-of-big-replication/
When he studied which psychological studies were replicatable, and had to choose whether to disbelieve some he'd previously based a lot of work on, Brian Nosek said:
I choose the red pill. That's what doing science is.
(via ciphergoth on twitter)
MORPHEUS: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe.
MORPHEUS: You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
From The Matrix Original Script (the wording is slightly different in the movie).
One of the last of the many legendary contests won by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer was his encounter with Mike Tyson in 1987. As related by Ben Rogers in ”A. J. Ayer: A Life,” Ayer — small, frail, slight as a sparrow and then 77 years old — was entertaining a group of models at a New York party when a girl ran in screaming that her friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. The parties involved turned out to be Tyson and Naomi Campbell.
”Do you know who … I am?” Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: ”I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.”
”And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,” Ayer answered politely. ”We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.”
So they did, while Campbell slipped away.
[Via] (http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/reviews/001224.24spurlit.html)
Impressive, but it does have a pretty dramatic possible failure state where Tyson's response is "I suggest we settle this by punching each other." (In deed if not in word.)
I think the cleverness is in the violation of Tyson's expectations about how the encounter will go. Ayer went off script and that seems to have nonplussed Tyson.
Why, because I cannot help feeling that you are now saying what is not quite consistent or accordant with what you were saying at first about rhetoric. And I am afraid to point this out to you, lest you should think that I have some animosity against you, and that I speak, not for the sake of discovering the truth, but from jealousy of you.
Now if you are one of my sort, I should like to cross-examine you, but if not I will let you alone. And what is my sort? you will ask. I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute-I for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another.
--Socrates in Gorgias (Paragraph break mine, to make it slightly less of a wall of text. This has shown up before, in a somewhat different form.)
A classic illustration of how to use (and how to not use) conditional probabilities:
..."'Her foot,' says the journal, 'was small- so are thousands of feet. Her garter is no proof whatever- nor is her shoe- for shoes and garters are sold in packages. The same may be said of the flowers in her hat. One thing upon which M. Beauvais strongly insists is, that the clasp on the garter found had been set back to take it in. This amounts to nothing; for most women find it proper to take a pair of garters home and, fit them to the size of the limbs they are to encircle, rather than to try them in the store where they purchase.'
Here it is difficult to suppose the reasoner in earnest. Had M. Beauvais, in his search for the body of Marie, discovered a corpse corresponding in general size and appearance to the missing girl, he would have been warranted (without reference to the question of habiliment at all) in forming an opinion that his search had been successful. If, in addition to the point of general size and contour, he had found upon the arm a peculiar hairy appearance which he had observed upon the living Marie, his opinion might have been justly strengthened; and the increase of pos
3.1.3.1 (Exercise) Have prices actually risen? Economists generally agree that the meaning of “prices have risen” is that you would prefer past prices to current prices. What makes this challenging is that the set of available products change over time. Cars have gone up significantly in price, but are also more reliable. Would you be better off with your current income in 1913 than today? You would be very rich with current average income in 1913, but not have access to modern medicine, television, electronics, refrigeration, highways, and many other technologies. If you made $40,000 annually in 1913, how would you live and what would you buy? (Do some research.)
-- R. Preston McAfee, Introduction to Economic Analysis
"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power."
-Lao Tzu (c.604 - 531 B.C.)
Expressed in pictures rather than words, but a great example of how to respond to humanity-threatening calamities:
http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus37.html?Bonjour
Sidenote: Almost every Minus comic is wonderful, and there aren't that many of them (you can read the whole series in an hour).
Is your hypothesis, "Eliezer wants to save the world from doom, and this picture is inspirational."? If so, I think you nailed it.
The girl with the bat, in the context of the comic, is actually basically omnipotent.
Not only is she entirely capable of destroying the asteroid and eliminating whatever threat it represents using a baseball bat, given the content of the other comics, I think there's actually a reasonable chance that she consciously or subconsciously created the asteroid in the first place to give herself something to do.
Minus is about as despicable as any ordinary child of seven or so would be if they were also omnipotent.
Which is to say she's kind of horrifying, but not with any sort of deliberation involved.
No one makes the wrong decisions for reasons they think are wrong. The more clever the man, as the Nroni were fond of saying, the more apt he was to make a fool of himself. We all argue ourselves into our mistakes.
Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior
A cucumber is bitter--throw it away. There are briars in the path--turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things put into the world?"
--Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.50
If you get one bitter cucumber, asking for its cause may be a waste of time. But if you get a lot of bitter cucumbers, spending some time on changing that might give net positive utility.
If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.
– Managoras, Ode to the Long-Lived Fool
Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior
Not sure, actually, dude was a corrupt lobbyist, so presumably he was emphasizing that he had his reasons for the stuff he got up to.
I like it as a reminder that everyone is their own story's protagonist. Its easy for me to view someone as the jerk who cut in front of the traffic, but presumably their own narrative includes a compelling reason for their seemingly antisocial behavior.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”
-- Karl Marx
"We evolve beyond the person we were a minute before! Little by little, we advance a bit further with each revolution. That's how a drill works!!"
-- Shimon the Digger
...But the campaign against the backwardness of the masses in this matter of religion, must be conducted with patience and considerateness, as well as with energy and perseverance. The credulous crowd is extremely sensitive to anything which hurts its feelings. To thrust atheism upon the masses, and in conjunction therewith to interfere forcibly with religious practices and to make mock of the objects of popular reverence, would not assist but would hinder the campaign against religion. If the church were to be persecuted, it would win sympathy among the mas
“It’s easy to put your head down and just work on what you think needs to be done. It’s a lot harder to pull your head up and ask why.” - Rework
“What does a fish know about the water in which he swims?” - Albert Einstein
Sort of a well known quote, but it's not here, and it's amazing, so I figured I'd submit it.
...Nevertheless, the problem of meandering is certain to re-emerge once we learn how to make machines that examine themselves to formulate their own new problems. Questioning one's own "top-level" goals always reveals the paradox-oscillation of ultimate purpose. How could one decide that a goal is worthwhile -- unless one already knew what it is that is worthwhile? How could one decide when a question is properly answered -- unless one knows how to answer that question itself? Parents dread such problems and enjoin kids to not take them seriously.
“I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself…but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, a...
"I have a complete listing of this universe's source code," says Ching. "I'm theoretically omnipotent. It's just a matter of time."
(potential spoilers removed, so if this dialogue doesn't make sense, be assured that it makes sense in context)
..."Just wait," Zsoronga said. "Something auspicious will happen. Some twist will keep you here, where you can discharge your fate! Wait and see."
"And what if they know?" Sorweel finally asked, voicing the one alternative they had passed over in silence.
"They don't know."
"But wh-"
"They don't know."
Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke
...So all these dire warnings about Internet-of-Things — well, they are a good sign for the industry in some ways. It’s emotional, it’s plaintive — it’s like you’re about to kiss somebody for the first time, and they suddenly look at you all big-eyed and tremulous and ask if you’re going to hurt them.
The only honest answer is OF COURSE you’re going to hurt them, at least some, and on occasion, but not on purpose and, what the hell, if it’s any good they’ll get over it! But nobody’s gonna scrape it down to that level of raw honesty, except for marriage counse
...If we work around this assumption of being cis as the default… like, for example, if we stop thinking about the fact that as an abstract, general question a random human being is much more likely to be cis than trans, and instead consider the question in terms of whether, given everything we observe in ourselves, and everything we feel, and how strong our feelings are about this question of gender, which (cis or trans) is more likely for us… if we consider “is it really all that likely that I’m just a cis person who has somehow managed to convince myself
Given that this quote essentially advises ignoring priors, I don't see what's so Bayesian about it.
if we stop thinking about the fact that as an abstract, general question a random human being is much more likely to be cis than trans
That said, it could also be taken as advising you not to double-count your priors by using them to discount the evidence. Imagine you've drawn a ball from an urn, and the ball looks blue to you — but your priors say that 99% of the balls in that urn are red. How much time do you want to spend questioning the validity of your color vision or the lighting before you consider that you drew a rare ball?
Well, it's possible to be wrong about your own feelings. The question that matters is "later, after transitioning, would I feel better or worse than I do now", which isn't necessarily infallibly correlated to your current feelings.
I say it doesn't, really. If you (a) like ManU in some sense, and (b) are willing to call yourself a ManU fan, you are a ManU fan.
And yet there are plenty of sports fans that question the legitimacy of other fans, based on accidental characteristics.
I.e., "You can't be an Auburn fan, you're a goddamn Yankee!"
Which, in essence, is the same problem I think: there's all sorts of semantic and pragmatic meaning attached to concepts like gender (and fandom!) that exist outside of the mind of the individually engendered or fanatic person, which cause other people to feel that their own meaning is being betrayed by that person. In a weird way, I think this is part of a failure to keep one's identity small - when people include potentially falsifiable beliefs-about-the-world/beliefs-about-others in their own identity, they risk having that identity thrown into crisis whenever those beliefs are challenged.
"Nothing can kill me because I am already dead."
-- Zombie Neitzsche
If we could achieve eternal life through the clever use of linguistic ambiguity, then post-structuralist continental philosophers would have defeated death long ago. What would the world be like, I wonder, if all forms of cleverness were useful? A candidate for weirdtopia, probably.
...An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries. Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental re
That's only if we take the Flynn effect at face value. No one does, because the implications are nonsense.
Go back in time and the average intelligence will be lower, but that's only because of a longer tail on the lower end of the distribution (the usual suspects: nutrition, lead poisoning, child abuse, iodine deficiency ...). On the smarter end, it's relatively unchanged because of diminishing returns.
The Flynn effect has many proposed, non mutually-exlusive causes, but an actual secular increase in real brain horsepower is not among the big ones.
Not a very good one, though. Most of the ancients that people pay attention to these days are the ones who were well-fed and well-read; it's strongly suspected much of the Flynn effect is population-wide increases in those two variables (as well as similar things like reduced disease load).
I have a historian standing next to me right now who says the lead poisoning story is BS and people who propagate it should be shot/severely eye-rolled at. He says that:
-Romans did drink lead-sweetened wine but
-only lower class romans did so because they could not afford better
-lead-sweetened wine continued to be drunk up until the 18th century
-While some people undoubtedly died, saying it caused the fall of the Roman Empire is a ridiculous just-so story
-particularly because the sweetener was used centuries before and after the fall with no increasing usage leading up to the fall
-and the eastern Roman empire continued to exist for another thousand years anyway.
The danger of reading financial & other news (or econobullshit) is that things that don't make sense at all start making sense to you after progressive immersion.
I will attempt to fix the quote:
The danger of reading financial & other news is that things that are wrong and crazy start seeming to make sense after you're immersed in them.
I'm good at blowing bubbles with bubble gum. I have yet to charge anyone for doing it.
I suppose you could say that as long as I gain pleasure from blowing bubbles I'm not doing it "for free" but that makes the statement very trivial. Under normal interpretations of "for free", the statement is wrong because there's no demand from anyone else that I blow bubbles.
I'd correct that statement to "if you're good at something, never do it under market value", which raises the possibility that I would still do for free things like blowing bubbles that have no market value.
I'm good at blowing bubbles with bubble gum. I have yet to charge anyone for doing it.
Gum bubble fetish camming?
I don't see the Ledger Joker as irrational, merely insane. It's just his morality and ethics that are horrible. As far as reaching his goals, he is extremely (unrealistically) competent. You don't flawlessly account for every move your opponents make, in advance, for 98% of your visible career, by being totally irrational.
I'm thankful this TV tropes page helpfully provided a synopsis of your fanfic for context. I wouldn't have understood you without it.
(Is the conditional probability that a given person had read all your fanfics, given that she visits LessWrong, high enough to overcome the low prior probability that a given person has read all your fanfics?)