"You sound awfully sure of yourself, Waterhouse! I wonder if you can get me to feel that same level of confidence."
Waterhouse frowns at the coffee mug. "Well, it's all math," he says. "If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the whole point of math."
-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Was the context one where Waterhouse was proving a conditional, "if axioms A, B, C, then theorem Z", or one where where he was trying to establish Z as a truth about the world, and therefore also had the burden of showing that axioms A, B, C were supported by experimental evidence?
I'm curious about this "liquid water is wet" statement. Obviously I agree, but for the sake of argument, could you taboo "is" and tell me the statement again? I'm trying to understand how your algorithm feels from the inside.
If you're curious how to quantify fractions of statements, you might enjoy this puzzle I heard once. Suppose you're an ecological researcher and you need to know the number of fish in a large lake. How would you get a handle on that number?
One of the parts of "liquid water is wet" is that a droplet of it will spread out on many common surfaces - salt, paper, cotton, etc. Yes, it is a bit tricky to unpack what is meant by"wet" - perhaps some other properties, like not withstanding shear are also folded in - but I don't think that it is just a tautology, with "wet" being defined as the set of properties that liquid water has.
Re the catch/count/mark/release/recapture/count puzzle - the degree to which that is feasible depends on how well one can do (reasonably) unbiased sampling. I'm skeptical that that will work well with the set of testable statements that one is automatically certain of.
After describing
blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
David Foster Wallace continues
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you will, too.
Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
There is a very large amount of stuff that one is automatically certain of that is correct, though trivial, data like "liquid water is wet". I'm not sure how one would even practically quantify an analysis of what fraction of the statements one is certain of are or are not true. Even if one could efficiently test them, how would one list them (in the current state of science - tracing a full human neural network (and then converting its beliefs into a list of testable statements) is beyond our current capabilities).
I disagree with the premise that there are only two reasons to want privacy.
Agreed. If nothing else, in a bargaining process, keeping the maximum/minimum price that one would accept private during the negotiation doesn't fit into either category.
I have long wondered whether civilization was a mistake. If it was, it is not an easy mistake to avoid. The stubborn persistence of the Comanches aside, once civilized people with technology and professional armies start competing with less civilized people, the results are always going to be lopsided in civilization's favor.
We might be at the bottom of a prisoner's dilemma, the descendants of people who defected from a happy equilibrium of hunting and gathering in order to gain a slight numerical and military advantage over their foes, only to end up with everyone large, well-armed, and miserable.
Book Review: Empire of the Summer Moon http://squid314.livejournal.com/340809.html
The empirical evidence that is in the link from Gunnar_Zarncke's post is:
And throughout the book's description of these events, there was one constant:
All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.
This is not just from introspection.
I cringe at the term x-risk.
Can you think of another five letter description? The shorter the term, the easier of a time people will have remembering it and thus the meme will spread faster than a longer term.
Can one use the backwards-E existence symbol as one of the letters?
Three Bayesians walk into a bar: a) what's the probability that this is a joke? b) what's the probability that one of the three is a Rabbi? c) given that one of the three is a Rabbi, what's the probability that this is a joke?
--Sorry, no cite. I got this from someone who said they'd been seeing it on twitter.
And what is the probability that one of them is a Prior?
There are a lot of people who really don't understand the structure of reality, or how prevalent and how destructive sociopaths (and the conformists that they influence) are.
In fact, there is a blind spot in most people's realities that's filled by their evolutionarily-determined blindness to sociopaths. This makes them easy prey for sociopaths, especially intelligent, extreme sociopaths (total sociopathy, lack of mirror neurons, total lack of empathy, as described by Robert Hare in "without conscience") with modern technology and a support network of other sociopaths.
In fact, virtually everyone who hasn't read Stanley Milgram's book about it, and put in a lot of thought about its implications is in this category. I'm not suggesting that you or anyone else in this conversation is "bad" or "ignorant," but just that you might not be referencing an accurate picture of political thought, political reality, political networks.
The world still doesn't have much of a problem with the "initiation of force" or "aggression." (Minus a minority of enlightened libertarian dissenters.) ...Especially not when it's labeled as "majoritarian government." ie: "Legitimized by a vote." However, a large and growing number of people who see reality accurately (small-L libertarians) consistently denounce the initiated use of force as grossly sub-optimal, immoral, and wrong. It is immoral because it causes suffering to innocent people.
Stangl could have recognized that the murder of women and children was "too wrong to tolerate." In fact, he did recognize this, by his comment that he felt "weak in the knees" while pushing women and children into the gas chamber. That he chose to follow "the path of compliance" "the path of obedience" and "the path of nonresistance" (all those prior paths are different ways of saying the same thing, with different emphasis on personal onus, and on the extent to which fear plays a defensible part in his decision-making).
The reason I still judge the Nazis (and their modern equivalents) harshly is because they faced significant opposition, but it was almost as wrong as they were. The levellers innovated proper jury trials in the 1600s, and restored them by the 1670, in the trial of William Penn. It wasn't as if Austria was without its "Golden Bull" either. Instead, they chose a mindless interpretation of "the will to power."
The rest of the world viewed Hitler as a raving madman. There were plenty of criticisms of Nazism in existence at the time of Hitler's rise to power. Adam Smith had written "The Wealth of Nations" over a century earlier. The Federalist and Anti-Federalists were right in incredible detail again, over a century earlier.
Talk about the prison industrial complex with anyone, and talk with someone who has family members imprisoned for a victimless crime offense. Talk with someone who knows Schaeffer Cox, (one of the many political prisoners in the USA). Most people will choose not to talk to these people (to remain ignorant) because knowledge imparts onus to act morally, and stop supporting immoral systems. To meet the Jews is to activate your mirror neurons, is to empathize with them, ...a dangerous thing to do when you're meeting them standing outside of a cattle car. Your statistical likelihood of being murdered by your own government, during peacetime, worldwide.
Concern about sociopaths applies to both business and government:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/01/09/3140081/bridge-sociopathy/
One paper examining a sizable sample of business folk found that percentage of sociopaths in the corporate world is 3.5 times higher than in the general population. Another study of 346 white-collar workers found that the percentage of corporate sociopaths increased as you go up the corporate ladder. That’s consistent with the reasons why politicians tend to be sociopaths: corporate leaders have lots of power over others and arguably even less need for empathy and conscience than politicians.
As far as possible, we should allow students to learn more and help guide them to the sciences. But scientists are in the end a small minority of the population and some things are important to teach to everyone. I don't think calculus passes that test, and neither does classic geometry and analytic geometry, which received a lot of time in my school.
Instead I would teach statistics, basic probability theory, programming (if you can sell it as applied math), basic set and number theory (e.g. countable and uncountable infinities, rational and real numbers), basic computer science with some important cryptography results given without proof (e.g. public-key encryption). At least one of these should demonstrate the concept of mathematical proofs and logic (set theory is a good candidate).
Interesting question. I'm a programmer who works in EDA software, including using transistor-level simulations, and I use surprisingly little math. Knowing the idea of a derivative (and how noisy numerical approximations to them can be!) is important - but it is really rare for me to actually compute one. It is reasonably common to run into a piece of code that reverses the transformation done by another pieces of code, but that is about it. The core algorithms of the simulators involves sophisticated math - but that is stable and encapsulated, so it is mostly a black box. As a citizen, statistics are potentially useful, but mostly just at the level of: This article quotes an X% change in something with N patients, does it look like N was large enough that this could possibly be statistically significant? But usually the problem with such studies in the the systematic errors, which are essentially impossible for a casual examination to find.
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That doesn't seem quite true... if I'm confused while reading a textbook, I may be perceiving the limits of my understanding but not perceiving magic.
Agreed. I think what Lanier should have said that a perception of magic is a subset of things one doesn't understand, rather than claiming that they are equal. Bugs that I am currently hunting but haven't nailed down are things I don't understand, but they certainly don't seem magical.