General Principle: the solutions (on balance) need to be simpler than the problems.
(Otherwise the system collapses under its complexity).
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Don't look for pleasure in convents, love in bordellos, intellect on campuses, wisdom in senates, nobility in law firms, loyalty in corporations, truth in fortune cookies, and literature in Vegas.
This said, I treasure Bob Dylan's songs. He is the best of the best. He was the symbol behind my dream of settling in America. But, to me, literature is something holy and consecrated, not something exclusively played to audiences in Las Vegas and similar places, the equivalent of Holywood. And I cannot possibly believe in sanctification from a prize denied to Borges.
Finally wrote the foreword.
https://medium.com/…/foreword-to-ed-thorps-memoirs-a-man-fo…
Cato the elder said that it was preferable to be asked why there was no statue honoring you than the reverse.
I wish a Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics ("Nobel") to one of the people I dislike so he feels the insecurity of a pedestal.
WHY THE MINORITY RULE DICTATES MORALS IN SOCIETIES, A PROBABILITISTIC ARGUMENT
(addition)
A probabilistic argument in favor of the minority rule dictating societal values is as follows. Wherever you look across societies and histories, you tend to find the same general moral laws prevailing, with some, but not significant, variations: do not steal (at least not from within the tribe); do not hunt orphans for pleasure; do not gratuitously beat up passers by for training, use i...nstead a boxing bags (unless you are Spartan and even then you can only kill a limited number of helots for training purposes), and similar interdicts. And we can see these rules evolving over time to become more universal, expanding to a broader set, to progressively include slaves, other tribes, other species (animals, economists), etc. And one property of these laws: they are black-and-white, binary, discrete, and allow no shadow. You cannot steal “a little bit” or murder “moderately”. You cannot keep Kosher and eat “just a little bit” of pork on Sunday barbecues.
Now it would be vastly more likely that these values emerged from a minority that the majority. Why? Take the following two theses:
- Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule — the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to be emerge independently across populations.
- What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be be black-and-white.
An example. Consider that an evil person wants to poison the collective by putting some product into soda cans. He has two options. The first is cyanide, which obeys a minority rule: a drop of poison (higher than a small threshold) makes the entire liquid poisonous. The second is a “majority”-style poison; it requires more than half the liquid to be poisonous in order to kill. Now look at the inverse problem, a collection of dead people after a dinner party, and you need to investigate the cause. The local Sherlock Holmes would assert that conditional on the outcome that all people drinking the soda having been killed, the evil man opted for the first not the second option. Simply, the majority rule leads to fluctuations around the average, with a high rate of survival.
The black-and-white character of these societal laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime, when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue.
https://medium.com/…/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictators…
Finally, the INCERTO is coming out in one single volume --the feeling one is writing a single book as a coherent unit rather than disparate body parts.
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I will be doing the same with the Technical Incerto.
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The quality of the paper is excellent. Note that the 2nd Edition of the Bed of Procrustes (50% longer) is part of it, and also published separately as paperback....
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https://www.amazon.com/Incerto-Fooled-Randomn…/…/ref=sr_1_3…
A gentleman taught a course called "rational expectations", about formation of beliefs from past observations (and experiences). He subscribed to a school of thought that held that people learn from their mistakes.
The fellow had been married four times.
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Another aspect of *skin in the game* is that people do not learn from the experience of others --as we saw with the professor, they don't even learn from their own experience. People who make mistakes --and harm others -- when they have skin in the game, are filtered out of the system, which lets evolution operate properly.
The classical idea is to build mental capacity, physical strength, and moral fortitude to face the world (Antifragile).
The modern one is to technologically change the world.
THREATS THAT ARE NOT JUST TAWK
There is this formidable scene in the Godfather when the Hollywood executive wakes up with a dead horse in his bed. It was a threat, and not an empty threat.
Threats reveal weakness, except when they are real. The method of conveying real threats was perfected by the sect of the Assassins, an 11th-14th C. sect that specialized in political assassination (they always spared civilians and people who were not directly targeted). Just as with the Go...dfather scene, legend has it that the head of an army moving against them woke up to find a dagger and a message near his head. It was a "recommendation" to stop the war (he promptly took the advice). They could have killed him, but they were too strong for that and proved it. They supposedly did the same with Saladin, informing him that the cake he was about to eat was poisoned... by them.
The Assassins were often associated with the Templars as they fought frequently on the side of the crusaders --they were part of a branch of Shiite Islam that was violently anti-Sunni.
The method of putting skin-in-the-game in political leaders started with the sicarii who used similar method of targeted assassination by means of a dagger (as opposed to the sword which entails battles).
They were exactly the opposite of Salafi terrorists: as I said, they killed leaders, not civilians, hence unlike wars their methods focusing on precision avoid the civilian "colateral damage". Comparisons with Jihadis get it backward: they were targeted (Salafis are not discriminating, going after anything that moves, even their own). Much of what we read about the Assassins can be smear by their enemies (including their name linked to Hashish).
And the dagger-near-the-pillow scene is signaling at its best: the most effective way to deal with an enemy is to prove to him that you own him. You are so strong that you keep him alive.
LINDY EFFECT: PLACENAMES ARE STICKY
The New York Municipality has been trying for 70 years to change 6th Avenue to "Avenue of the Americas", unsuccessfully.
Place names are sticky, we should be able to get back 6000 year old languages... from the names. Or the timing of the settlement. I speculate that the placename is likely to correspond to the time of the first settlement and sticks throughout. Cartagena in Spain was a Carthaginian settlement (itself from Kart-7adash). A...ll villages in the Levant bear either ancient Semitic (Canaanite or Aramaic) or Greek names ("Kfar-something", "Beit-something"). It is when a new settlement is made, such as Laodikeia (during the Seleucids, 3-4th C BC) that a new name appears, or when one part near a small town is rebuilt as a government center such as Caesarea. When the Romans give a placename, it is usually a corruption of the originial: Berytus to Beirut (small well in Canaanite), Apamea from 7ama (though it is not in the same location), etc.
Now let us speculate. Knossos, the Minoan center, maps most certainly to to a Semitic root (meaning gathering, like Knesseth, Knisse, etc.), so I conjecture whether Linear B=>Canaanite or reverse.
I also speculate that there is a deep connection of pre-Canaanite for my ancestral village Amioun: 3am Yawan "the Ionian people's settlement" in Canaanite (we have same genes and genetic diseases as Cretans).
And Marseilles, in France, while its inhabitants claim a Phocaean origin (Greeks of Asia Minor), makes me suspect a Phoenician connection, since "Marsa" means port in Canaanite and a nearby hilltop village is called Ramatuelle, from "Ramat El", Hill of God, which is certainly Phoenician placename.
The more you use a metric ("metrify"), the more you will compare yourself to others.
The more you compare yourself to others, whether favorably or unfavorably, the worse off you will be.
(This continues the odometer story).
Someone I know refrained from riding his bicycle because the odometer was broken. He felt that his cycling didn't count towards his "goal".
This is what happens with systems that becomes "modernized".
By the Lindy Effect, you should know 20 times more about history of the past 2000 years than that of the past 100 years.
In fact, not only most people know more about the past 100 years, but they knew even more about the past 100 days.
Further, history is not geopolitics (who met whom) or wars, but an understanding of what people used, ate, produced, thought, and argued about.
Found the picture of my 21y old self that I mentioned in the commencement address.
https://medium.com/…/commencement-address-american-universi…
Academia is (nearly) zero-sum: every position, honor, promotion, rank, and reward is taken from someone else.
Business on the other hand creates business.
That's the only career advice I feel compelled to give.
Evolution of the idea.
https://medium.com/…/we-dont-know-what-we-are-talking-about…
Anger is privilege for the strong, duty for the righteous, and self-harm for the weak.
This is for philosophical discussions. Please, no finance (or similarly depraved topics), and no journalists. Only fun people. Commentators, please...
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