I've always thought that the idea of "believing in" things was very curious. This is a very thought-provoking article. Every time I engage a debate about this subject (the relevance or usefulness of beliefs) someone is sure to say something about beliefs existing for the benefit of the believer. My feeling is that with most beliefs and with most believers, there is an internal acknowledgement of the falsifiablity of their belief which is outweighed by the perception that some benefit is derived from the belief. What I interpret from this is that ...
This may be worth pointing out. If you know of one person who is a perfectionist and others who aren't, you may have the tendency of thinking that the perfectionistic person is unhappy due to their perfectionism. In reality the person may be unhappy for other or diverse reasons, and you're projecting the perfectionism as the reason because you perceive that you would be unhappy if you had such a level of self-analysis. You may have also been right that this person is unhappy to a significant degree from the perfectionism, but that doesn't necessarily mean ...
Just to clarify the utility of randomness issue, I think what some respondents are talking about is the benefit of unpredictablility, which is instrumental when playing a game against a live opponent. This is totally different from randomizing. I also don't think that saying that ants "randomly" search for food is the most accurate way to describe their process. So randomness, in its strict interpretation, is never optimal game strategy. Another thought I had is that there are some circumstances in which it would make sense to change one's predic... (read more)