If this gets promoted, it will make an interesting case study in what it takes for a completely off-topic link reference to get promoted.

Hi everyone.

My name is Alan Godfrey.

I am fascinated by rational debate and logical arguments, and I appear to have struck gold in finding this site! I am the first to admit my own failings in these areas but am always willing to learn and grow.

I'm a graduate of mathematics from Trinity Hall, Cambridge University and probability and statistics have always been my areas of expertise - although I find numbers so much more pleasant to play with than theorems and proofs so bear with me!

I'm also a passive member of Mensa. While most of it does not interest me the numerical, pattern spotting and spatial awareness puzzles that it is associated with have always been a big passion of mine.

I have a personal fascination in human psychology, especially my own in a narcissistic way! Although I have no skill in this area.

I currently work for a specialist insurance company and head the catastrophe modelling function, which uses a baffling mixture of all of the above! It was through this that I attended a brief seminar at the 21st Century School in Oxford which mentioned this site as an affiliation although I had already found it a few months previously.

I come to this site with open eyes and an open mind. I hope to contribute insightful observation, engage in healthy discussion and ultimately come away better than I came in.

I want to present my theory now for comparison: A joke is funny when it finds a situation that has (at least) two valid "decodings", or perhaps two valid "relevant aspects".

I too have a proto-theory. My theory is that humor is when there is a connection between the joke & punchline which is obvious to the person in retrospect, but not initially.

Hence, a pun is funny because the connection is unpredictable in advance, but clear in retrospect; Eliezer's joke about the motorist and the asylum inmate is funny because we were predicting some other response other than the logical one; similarly for 'why did the duck cross the road? to get to the other side' is not funny to someone who has never heard any of the road jokes, but to someone who has and is thinking of zany explanations, the reversion to normality is unpredicted.

Your theory doesn't work with absurdist humor. There isn't initially 1 valid decoding, much less 2.

Puns are pretty much "the formula" for making jokes. Though they can get old, they're always recognizable as jokes, which suggests that a theory based on "multiple meaning/decoding/framing" is probably on track. Hm, I wonder who suggested such a theory... ;-)

How do puns fit in?

Name calling aside, you missed the point again. It's not Malthusianism, it's algebra.

per capita wealth equals wealth divided by population

By simple algebra, killing people without decreasing wealth increases per capita wealth, and thus a significant percentage of the population dying will artificially look like economic growth if you're measuring growth per capita.

Hwæt. I've been thinking about humor, why humor exists, and what things we find humorous. I've come up with a proto-theory that seems to work more often than not, and a somewhat reasonable evolutionary justification. This makes it better than any theory you can find on Wikipedia, as none of those theories work even half the time, and their evolutionary justifications are all weak or absent. I think.

So here are four model jokes that are kind of representative of the space of all funny things:

"Why did Jeremy sit on the television? He wanted to be on TV." (from a children's joke book)

"Muffins? Who falls for those? A muffin is a bald cupcake!" (from Jim Gaffigan)

"It's next Wednesday." "The day after tomorrow?" "No, NEXT Wednesday." "The day after tomorrow IS next Wednesday!" "Well, if I meant that, I would have said THIS Wednesday!" (from Seinfeld)

"A minister, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says, 'Is this some kind of joke?'" (a traditional joke)

It may be noting that this "sample" lacks any overtly political jokes; I couldn't think of any.

The proto-theory I have is that a joke is something that points out reasonable behavior and then lets the audience conclude that it's the wrong behavior. This seems to explain the first three perfectly, but it doesn't explain the last one at all; the only thing special about the last joke is that the bartender has impossible insight into the nature of the situation (that it's a joke).

The supposed evolutionary utility of this is that it lets members of a tribe know what behavior is wrong within the tribe, thereby helping it recognize outsiders. The problem with this is that outsiders' behavior isn't always funny. If the new student asks for both cream and lemon in their tea, that's funny. If the new employee swears and makes racist comments all the time, that's offensive. If the guy sitting behind you starts moaning and grunting, that's worrying. What's the difference? Why is this difference useful?

Discussions of correctly calibrated cognition, e.g. tracking the predictions of pundits, successes of science, graphing one's own accuracy with tools like PredictionBook, and so on, tend to focus on positive prediction: being right about something we did predict.

Should we also count as a calibration issue the failure to predict something that, in retrospect, should have been not only predictable but predicted? (The proverbial example is "painting yourself into a corner".)

This conversation has been hacked.

The parent comment points to an article presenting a hypothesis. The reply flatly drops an assertion which will predictably derail conversation away from any discussion of the article.

If you're going to make a comment like that, and if you prefix it with something along the lines of "The hypothesis in the article seems superfluous to me; men in all cultures treat women like children because...", and you point to sources for this claim, then I would confidently predict no downvotes will result.

(ETA: well, in this case the downvote is mine, which makes prediction a little too easy - but the point stands.)

Edited, with strikethrough. I wish one could mark comments as applying to a past version of a post - just making the edit would make this exchange meaningless.