God/Ungod. Getting Beyond the Debates.

Been a long time since I posted anything new. Fitting I suppose that I end with the same topic that drew me into philosophy in the first place - the whole theist/other debate.

General daily internet procrastination led me, via a random youtube walk, from "The Big Fat Quiz of the 80s" to "What's Stephen Fry doing now..?" and I was surprised to find the wonderful Mr. Fry, alongside Christopher Hitchens, involved in a debate on whether religion is a force for good in the world. Fry's statements, more from the heart at times perhaps, than the head, moved me the most - despite the other three contenders being more... polished if you like, more confident, practiced, sure of effect - more focussed on well, winning. Here's the vid. Long, but not a bad way to kill an hour or so.

 Some more procrastination later... I slogged through another rendition of the same debate - again with a now unfortunately ill Hitchens - this time contending the topic against ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blaire. I watched with much the same expectations as you would hold when clicking on a funny gif on Pintrest, to see someone take a pratfall, or at least get a bunch of snow shoved down their pants.
However, those expectations were not met.

Of course, strictly in terms of debating - Blaire loses. He's woolly, overly accommodating of his opponent and flatly unaggressive. All fairly fatal in academic debate. But unlike most of the commentators below the video on the site I don't think Blaire made a fool of himself. Or even lost from a wider perspective. I don't really think it was ever his prime intention to argue with the same agenda as Hitchens. Maybe it was, maybe he staggered accidently to heroism in my eyes. I dunno, it's Tony Blaire afterall.

Hitchens, like Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the other famous theist bashers, seem content to "win" - to show up their resident theist as a either a self-deluded and self-contradictory (though possibly well intentioned) fool at best or an actively self-congratulatory and willfully evil force in extremis. And sure, acting on the world's stages great and small to run damage control on Religion is something still to be applauded.

As a veteran of many theist vs. agnostic/atheist debates on the world's smallest and most useless stage - internet philosophy sites - I can appreciate the professionalism of discussion on the part of the Atheists. But it is just shooting fish in a barrel given the arena. If the same debate had taken place in a revialist tent somewhere in the sticks, the thiests would have simply eaten the atheists for lunch. Audience-vote-wise. I think Tony was smart enough to realise this, and instead simply used the platform presented to speak to the people not there. Procrastinators and random stumblers like me.

The thing that drove me away from philosophic discussions is the futility of them in the real world. The days when reason and rhetoric could sway the opinions of everyday poeple concernning anything meaningful to them are over, if indeed they ever existed. Reason and rhetoric only appeal to those open to reason and rhetoric. To those educated to be open to reason and rhetoric.

One of the few philosophic ideas I ever bought wholly into is Hume's

(from a famous passage discussing the "motivating influence of the will" in his Treatise on Human Nature) reads in full:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. (T 2.3.3 p. 415)

The context is his discussion of what is sometimes called "moral psychology", the study of how we are motivated to act morally.

I take it more generally to mean that reason alone, lacks enough oomph to motivate us, and by "us" here I really mean the rest of the brain's systems, and eventually the body itself, into action. It only succeeds if it recruits - resonates with - enough emotional drive - the baser drives - sex, hunger, fear, love - you name it. And this is where secularism has always failed, because it speaks almost wholly to reason, indeed, demands the listener to have already either been exposed to counter-dogmatic arguments, or to have thought and questioned for themselves, and religion has always succeeded, because it asks nothing of the listener, expects nothing of the listener, except obedience.

Part way through the Blaire vs. Hitchens debate, they do agree on one crucial point, that religion will never be erradicated. To me, this was where Tony won the war, if not the debate. This makes religion a given, part of the enviroment. Dawkins, Hitchens, et al, including me if you like, may as well try to prove that the rain is wrong for all the good it will do. Doesn't mean the rain will stop.

For all Tony Blaire's faults, he was the prime-minister of Great Britain and as such wielded great power during troubled times. I think that taught him that it is not simply enough to point out the emperor's lack of clothes, but that to effect change one must really become the emperor, and not only that but whilst doing so, somehow preserve the initial innocence, that need to effect change, that set them on the path. No easy task, especially considering that the path to power within however lesser or greater corrupt a system demands a certain degree of corruption, or at the very least a degree of compromise with corruption, from the applicant themselves.

Most people, politician or priest, at the outset of their careers are well intentioned, I think. It is the process of reaching the position they desire, the position from which they would be able to enact the changes they aspired to, that emeshes them, and the well-being of those they love, so wholly within its fabric that when they reach the point where they finally have the power to weaken, reform, make fair, right the wrongs that once seemed so clear and necessary... Doing so seems somehow foolish, selfish, absurd. No easy thing to fight so hard to become king, only to tear down your kingdom and return to poverty.

The heroism of a good politician, or a priest I guess, is the retention of their initial naivety.

In the first debate, Stephen Fry came across to me as the most human of the four speakers. Hitchens was obviously just doing his job, going through the motions, shooting those fish. The two theists were equally professional. Detached to a point from the actualites in the world of the church's dictates. Only Fry seemed to put his heart into it. To care personally about the situation. Again I think, a symptom of his inexperience, his brave naivety. And this is what sways audiences, sways public opinion, this resonance of emotion, this overt signal of deep belief, deep investment in the words being said, alongside the eloquence and authority necessary to be in a position to say them at all.

Religions will only ever change when that change arises from within, sponsored by one of their own - someone like Tony Blaire -  in reaction to mass public opinion. Everyone's opinon, from the least educated to the most, swayed by people like Stephen Fry, who not only have the power to speak well, but retain enough emotional connection to give the words an instinctive veracity.

Game Theory 101

First of all the title "game theory" is misleading - Von Neuman's obsession with poker started it - but it has long ago escaped the confines of games. Better would be "interactive theory" perhaps.

Anyway. Very basically the theory studies individuals or groups of agents - active objects with the ability to make 'choices' or at least implement strategies, even if they are rigidly confined by either biology/genetics, society or programming in the case of simulations. I'd argue you can also apply it to interactions between anything and anything as long as the two systems are reactive - ie having effect upon each other - but that might just be me.

Anyway. It cuts the various acts of reciprocation down into two basic responses:

Co-operation: This means things like fair trading practices, fidelity in relationships, alliance in war, adherrence to social contracts, sticking to the rules and not punching your opponent straight in the gonads in boxing matches - that kinda stuff.

Non-co-operation: This can mean anything from sticking a spear or putting a bullet into someone at one extreme, to not quite pulling your full weight in a group endeavor - Imagine 6 guys shouldering a coffin full of very fat guy for example. Bearers 1 through 5 are all putting their backs into it, but bearer 6 is just pretending - at the other end of the scale.

Let's shorten them to co and no to save my tendons.

There is also an abstracted pay-off scheme, for each outcome ie:

co-co // no-co // co-no // no-no.

Usually, **but not always, the pay-off (individual) is highest for no-co, (for the 'no' individual) and lowest (individual) for co-no (for the co individual). Co-co gives the highest group pay-off, and no-no the lowest.

** this 'not always' is the problem. Some social conditions create arenas of moral hazard - this is when the benefits of co-co (or punishments of no-co // no-no) are low, or marginal - raising the temptation of exploitive action. Blacks in ghettos for example have little incentive to co-co the social contract, since it soon becomes apparant that the second player - society/government is kinda playing a co-no strategy, through discrimination or prejudice.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

So, anyway - social progression.

Let's start with the big old verdant and fully fauna'd world of our ancestors ze goddamn far-too-much-talked about hunter-gatherer groups.

Let's assume they are fairly tightly bound by genetic lineages and inter-coupling - that way we can call them a superorganism and count them as a single effective unit - like an ant colony. They are self - everything else - bears, trees, other people - is not-self.

The important thing to remember is at this stage is the world is large, punishments from outside forces are absent and the group is few in number. These are the conditions which sponsor exploititive no-co strategies.

If you count the enviroment as an interactive partner, the whole human race has been playing no-co for pretty much its entire history. Anything that moved got speared and eaten, anything that didn't, got cut down/dug up and burned, turned into tools or building materials or food again. Slash and burn baby burn. It is only now, now that the ecosystem is finally beginning to fall into a state that punishes humanity that we are beginning to foster co-co strategies: fell a tree, plant a tree etc.

Anyway. Living space is also a resource. Game theory really kicks off when two ungenetically related players or groups of players come together. I think you can still see examples of the initial state in some tribes in jungle somewhere - fucked if I can remember the details. Basically, you're out in the jungle/forest/plain wherever, tracking a pig with some mates. (You have the friends, not the pig). When suddenly, you bump into another bunch of people that - jeepers - you do not know.

Imagine how scary that would be. If you'd been going around believing you were the only people left on the Earth. Imagine every "the Aliens have landed" film you've ever seen. What's mankind's usual response to Aliens..? Yay. It's the "Well, bullets didn't work general, we'll have to go for the nuclear option."

Somehow it's never the "Well, they didn't like the cheesecake general, we'll have to go with the croissants."

[snicker]

So: Tribe A / Tribe B

Ano/Bno - War or constant attrition. Either way, both groups stay isolated, stay small.
Aco/Bno or Ano/Bco - A/B gets completely fucked over, and/or turned into just another passive resource - producing a harvest of worker uniits or reproductive units.
Aco/Bco - the two tribes unite into a larger superorganism, for as long as the alliance holds.

It must be remembered however, initially - the no-co option ie. "automatically exploit" - is the safest, and the best for as long as your opponents are few enough in number to completely erradicate without major losses inflicted on your side. Now, intuitively, you'd think this automatic-exploit behaviour would eventually come to an equilibrium state - ie. peaceful - with one huge genetically related super-organism/tribe dominating any given area over time, but, this is not the case.

Due to monkeysphere constrictions on coherrent group sizes - 150-200 in our case - natural factionation occurs, even between related sub-groups, and there is never any peace, even if intially one single group dominates the entire area. Running out of external enemies just means you'll create some more, but this time from within the group.

Automatic non-cooperative strategies ensure small isolated group sizes.

Over time - assuming there are or eventually will be - a lot of sub-groups all living interactively, the larger co-co groups will begin to dominate the area. And will continue to do so for as long as they can maintain co-operation.

This is where eye-for-eye strategies spring from. Primitive social contracting. Honour codes. Basically they mean "I won't attack first". This is where old-time religion - as I said in "God of War" - and biology (sexual attraction) kinda fucks things up. If everybody knows the rules, knows where the lines are, eyeforeye works just super. But it only takes one 'Helen of Troy' or one 'don't work on the sabbath' or maybe even just a 'I misunderstood what you said but I'm too damn stubborn to admit it and back down you son of a bitch' and the whole thing comes falling down, and you are back to the old no-no / co-no situation of isolated groups all at each other's throats, either in smaller interfamillial vendetta or full fledged society vs. society war. And it is conflict without escape because eyeforeye disallows forgiveness in that this strategy only repeats whatever the other player did in the last round of the game. If A went with no, then B will go with no too in the next. Each feeds off the other's enmitiy producing a spiral back into primitive conditions, and if no recourse is found, death or exploitation for both at the hand of another superorganism still running a co-co strategy.

Strategies which allow for initial tolerance of infractions enable the players to maintain co-co relationships. ie. Instead of just automatically hitting the poor foreign ambassador who looked at your girlfriend in a funny way, or actually said "You have the head of an dung-beetle" when really he was just enquiring which way the latrine was, you stop and ask "Er, why are you looking at my girlfriend in a funny way..?" Or "Er, I think you mean 'where's the toilet', and if so, it's over there, just follow your nose."

The other cheek. A useful appliance.

So in a long enough time-frame, areas become dominated, by definition, by super-large tolerant social contractors. This is only at the local level btw. I'm not talking about the Ruler/ruled version so much. You can have a society loosely co-co with a despotic no-co ruler, if not for very long (because the moral hazard of rewards for exploititive behaviour - ie. positions in the aristocracy/governing body vs. the lesser if more global rewards of remaining a part of the co-co proletariat - becomes too tempting for the majority of the public to resist and society gradually implodes through lack of trust - as each member begins to back-stab his aquaintances in order to scramble up the rungs of power).

When tolerant societies become established and entrenched, then, like the 6th coffin bearer who sneakily refused to carry his full share of fat guy to his own benefit (though not to the point where the whole operation of "transport fat dead guy from point X to point Z" was jepordized and his laziness discovered - this is an important distinction) - some people choose opportunism. Actually, to say 'some people choose' is wrong, better to say "society reaches a point where it can support a substantial proportion of opportunists without losing equilibrium".

You can see the same pattern reflected in trading and business too - In the progression from some guy with a wheelbarrow hawking stuff on the street, all the way up to vast multinationals.

The inevitability of "to be this, requires it to have acted thus" - the linkage between defined and definition - is king.

...Continued...

Black swan

Notes on the Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb:

Pg.36. Non-scalable and Scalable situations. ie: Mediocristan/guassian vs. Extremistan/Mandelbrot

Comparing situations in which the average value is largely unaffected by the addition of a new individual value (physically contrained sets like height or weight, or systems where something is constructed from scratch in each transaction) with situations that are unconstrained - such as personal wealth, or booksales - where there tend to be either absolute losers with zero sales or insignificant property, and true giants like Harry Potter or Bill gates - where the addition of a single extra individual (a black swan) can totally upset the previous average value.

Pg 40: The Turkey lesson about corroborative past - 1000 days of feeding, and on the 1001st day, a twisted neck.

Pg 54: The error of confirmation: "No evidence of X" is not the same as "Evidence of no X"

Pg 59: Switching things round:
"There are no black swans." -->
"All swans are white" ==>
"Anything not white cannot be a swan"

According to (faulty) confirmative logic, that which confirms the second - the sighting of a red mini for example, also confirms the former, that all swans are white.

Pg 68: Cost benefit + information:

*Information is costly to obtain, costly to store and costly to manipulate and retrieve.

To reduce these costs we use patterns and rules to compress/reduce the amount of information needed to re-create the object/event/uncompressed information

However - in so summarizing - we also add more 'order' to the world as we percieve it than there really is - and hence are prone to underestimating the degree of randominity extant in the real world.

Pg. 71 - this error of derived rules - the narrative falacy (drawing of 'story'-like conections between things perhaps not truly connected) and the ludic falacy (using a simulation or 'game'like abstract representation of a real-life situation to draw conclusions, predictions and rules concerning that real life situation - and placing too much faith in them) also effects memory - creating a palimpsest - as you remember not the actual event first recorded, but your memory of remembering of that event, and then the memory of the memory of remembering that event. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, sometimes the details get fuzzy, and sometimes parts of that attendent fuzz get interpreted as something else entirely.

Pg. 76: Narrative fallacy:

"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife."
"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife to get her inheritence."

The second intuitively seems more likely, though it is in fact not.

Pg. 80: The power of emotional connection - "One death is a tragedy - a million is a statistic." Stalin. That which cannot be easily and vividly imagined, effects us but slightly.

Pg 100: The problem of silent evidence, and the self-sampling assumption. ie: of course all gamblers have beginner's luck - otherwise they wouldn't have become gamblers. Those that prayed but drowned anyway, did not survive to tell the story of how their praying saved their lives.

Pg.107: That which does not kill you makes you weaker. The idea that people are somehow hardened through sub-lethal physical hardship and adversity - which 'weeds out' the weak from the strong - is fallicious because it neglects to state that the surviving 'strong' are also weakened by their trial. The progeny of those so selected perhaps, but again how much strength is derived from nurture, and how much from nurture. How much genetic, how much epigenetic..?

Pg 112: Visable effect. "Look at what I did for you." is more easily marketed than "Look at what I avoided for you." ie: A catastrophe visibly combatted is much more media-friendly than a catastrophe so well prevented that even its threat never broke the surface tension of public perception. (eg. the politician who has saved the most lives is actually the man who exposed the safety records of car manufacturers and made seatbelts maditory, but who even knows his name..?)

Pg. 139: People's evaluations of [the certainty of] their own knowledge is frequently exaggerated. Usually by a factor of twenty. A 2% estimate of error in some area of knowledge is in reality around 40 - 45%. A better education usually increases the error margin, rather than closes it. ie: a graduate is only slightly more knowledgable than X, but is many times more confident in that knowledge.

Pg. 146: Experts and and empty suits: Techné = craft. [know-how] Epistémé = knowledge. [know-what] Imagine you will have an operation - do you want 'know-how' in the form of a surgeon..? Or 'Know-what' in the form of a popular science writer..?

Expert professions: livestock judges, astronomers, test pilots, chess masters, physicists, accountants, pure mathematicians, insurance analysts (as long as dealing with constrained "mediocristan" subjects). The subject matter does not 'move' - chess is chess today, and chess tomorrow, the mechanics of flying does not radically change from day to day, today's cow is tomorrow's cow. ie: the black swan liability is low.

Non-Experts 'professions': stockbrokers, pyschiatrists, psychologists, court judges, councilors, intelligence analysts, financial advisors. High variability linked with overconfident evaluations and high margins of error... Empty suits and empty words, however convincing they may be.

Pg. 151 & 153: Accuracy of prediction. Study reveals that a PHD makes no difference in accuracy. However - a big reputation makes people worse at prediction than those who have none. Famous people also make bad predictors.

Pg. 159: Points of reference: A subconscious tendency to use (random) numbers as seed crystals around which to build belief. A study showed that people shown a (random) number were influenced by it in later tasks involved in estimation - a high number produced higher estimations than a lower number for example.

People find it almost impossible to evaluate something in isolation without some [arbitrary] point to work from.

cf: James No2's lack of absolute originality - everything is related to past matters. What goes before sets the stage for what comes after.

Pg. 171/2/3: Limitations on forecasting essentially historical events - Soft historical studies/social science - are too based in the narrative fallacy to be dependable as anything but fiction. Popper.

"Fundamentally unpredictable" to know the future is to make the future into the present. To correctly predict the future you must also predict accurately the technology of the future. If you can do that, then simply by idea difusion, you will probably be able to create the technology of the future today.

The law of iterated expectations - "If I expect to expect something at a later date, then I already expect that something in the present."

Predictions of the future are really merely re-runs of today and yesterday, perhaps with a few extra bells and whistles. ie: predict tomorrow with reasonable certainty, but not next week.

Pg. 178: problems with prediction from incomplete information. Billiard balls.

Two balls colliding - easy. Three, possible with precise knowledge of initial states... Nine - you need to take into account the gravitational effects of anyone near the table... Fifty-six impacts - you need to exactly know the states of every single elementary particle in the universe.

Billiard balls are easy - they have no personal needs, drivers or desires. predicting collisions between people however...

... And yet that is what social scientists and economists believe they can [reliably/accurately] do. To give themselves a leg to stand on they assume that everyone acts "rationally" (acting toward their best interests in all futures) and "coherrently" (adherring faithfully to habits and predilictions).

The chief fallacy of this is two-fold - it assumes everyone within a given sample has equal knowledge and the ability to put it into practice, and that all habits/predilictions are strongly held.

Given that people frequently make irrational and inconsistant choices - the general theories of economic optimization fail. There can be no "general theory" from which to make [long-range] predictions concerning any topic in which people are a variable - the branching error margins for their decisions/actions become exponential.

Pg. 195: Prediction errors and motivation [aka anticipated utility/affective forecasting]. It is thought a certain degree of prediction bias is innate and serves as a cue toward [beneficial/aversive] action. We overestimate, sometimes drastically, the impact of future events, both good and bad, on our lives. That new car becomes less a vehicle than a key to heaven; that impending redundancy becomes not so much a hiccup but an all consuming tidal wave.

Without such a fanfare and hullabaloo however - would we ever get up off the sofa..?

Pg. 196: Forward is easy, backward is hard. An ice cube is melting. Predicting the shape of the puddle it will make is difficult, but not entirely impossible, if you measure sufficiently well the starting conditions. But now, given a random puddle of water, try to reconstruct exactly what made it...

Helenus, of the iliad (son of priam and hecuba captured and made to tell the acheans how to capture troy) was a seer who predicted backward - seeing the past from its barest remnants.

Pg. 198: The death of determinism. Is everything determined..? Is randomness truly random or deterministic chaos...?

Random has no predictable properties, not even a predictable unpredictability. Chaos however, conceals a predictable order beneath a superficial surface of fake 'random'. It has predictable elements - but they are [very very] hard to know.

It doesn't matter. For any practical purpose, both are the same. Randomness is incomplete information. Opacity. And induction the fallacy of believing facet of life X. is non-random from insufficient observation.

Pg. 205: Barbell strategy in investment - hyper-conservatism and hyper-aggression. Because risk assessments are always error-prone the best way to invest is in the same way as you would gamble so as to invite good fortune and minimize losses. ie, bet big on sure things, but also bet a little at huge odds just on the off-chance. "Medium sized" bets are the worst - they are lauded as 'safe' but for relatively little return in reality risk huge losses should you invest heavily.

ie: two horses: Mr. Racecourse-Rocket and Mr. No-Hoper. MRR always always places in every race he ever enters. Lousy odds, but a big enough bet each way will always pay for your dinner, if maybe not dessert. MNH however wins a race maybe once in a blue moon, (if there's always an eclipse at the same time) at truly stupendous odds (he's the google of racehorses) - put a fiver on him every week, okay, you'll bleed out slow, but if he ever comes in, you can retire.

ie: invest at both ends of the spectrum, at something like 85% / 15% split - but never in the middle.

(This btw. is also why casinos limit single bets to sizes that won't ever bankrupt them - because the combined losses of the many always more than cover the lucky high-rolling few on any given day).

Pg. 216: Sherwin Rosen - the economics of superstars. The differential in earnings between X and Y in extremistan professions - TV celebrity, sports and films etc is increasing. But this does not mean that X is hugely better than Y at their profession, only that these professions instigate a 'tournament' effect - the winner only has to win by even the merest of margins to scoop the whole pot.

Of course, they can also win by pure luck. And once the initial event has occurred, social coherence/adherence effects re-inforce the outcome as people gravitate toward the winner - heaping upon him or her the adulation and material prizes which may indeed make that person win yet again.

ie: two books in the same catagory - horror say - one's a Stephen King, one's a Mr. Nobody. All other things being equal enough people would instinctively buy the former over the latter to make sure that Mr. Nobody stayed Mr. Nobody, however good Mr. Nobody might really be.

Pg. 218/219 Merton's ideas of "preferential attachment" (herding in choices / preferences) and cumulative advantage (the first million is the hardest - success attracts greater successes etc.) leads to Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noting the link between the globalization of culture and the increased concentration of success. ie - the tournament effect above doesn't really depend on the actual number of players, it still tends to funnel success toward an ever smaller proportion of the population - given that that population is sufficiently well linked together both in comms hardware/software and through shared cultural reference points. MTV say, or concepts of female beauty - Whatever the credo, a punter is still a punter.

In general - the big get bigger, and the small either get smaller or stay the same. ie: We feel - like female birds at a lek - more comfortable with choices that already have been agreed with. (Which also explains the sudden attractiveness you gain from having a girlfriend :) ).

Zipf's law. Linguistics - the idea that the more you use a word, the less effortful it will be to use again. ie: we tend to fish out words from our private lexus with an ease and regularity dependent upon the frequency of their past use. (on the part of the individual and within his/her linguistic enviroment - leading to local dialects appearing quickly if isolated sufficiently)

eg - in English there are roughly 60,000 main words, of which only a few hundred constitute the bulk of written English and even fewer in casual conversation.

Pg. 227: Michael Marmot - Whitehall studies - shows, even adjusting for disease, a higher social status positively effects longevity. eg: an Oscar is worth an extra five years of life to an actor.

People who live in societies with relatively flat social gradients live longer en toto than the populaces of steeply-graded societies. Being a loser kills.

Pg. 233. The Guassian lie: The precipitous fall off slopes of the bell curve - as you move away from the 'norm' - produce probabilities so unfeasibly low that black swans seem completely out of the picture in any sane world. Trouble is, it is massively sensitive to errors in the measurement of sigma (standard deviation) to the point where a very small miscalculation can result in gross (a factor of a trillion for example at 20-21 sigma) underestimation of risks - if a guassian curve is applied to a scaleable situation - such as the stock-market - and used as a reliable predictor of risk... everyone, sooner or later, is totally fucked.

A Mediocristan (guassian) plot has an inconstant (exponential for example) decline as you move away from the centre in either direction, and an extremistan (Mandelbrotian) plot - follows a constant decrease as you move away. Anticipating risks with much greater levels of probability.

The key is to correctly apply the right curve to the right situation, rather than a one-size fits all approach.

Pg. 244: How do you tell where you are..? If you are dealing with yes/no questions, in which magnitudes do not matter or are non-existant (dead/not dead - pregnant/not pregnant - have a something/Don't have a something) then you are in mediocristan. If the magnitude does matter (how much money - how many hits) then you're in extremistan.

Pg. 250: Guassian Assumptions:

One: coin flips have no memory. They are isolate in time and space. You never 'get better' at flipping coins, a head today does not influence the likelihood of another tomorrow.

See - "preferential attachment" and "cumulative advantage" both mean real-world events do not obey Gaussian assumption. Suddenly forty heads in a row becomes more likely than a completely random mix.

Two: Random walks without wild leaps. A Guassian world view has steps of equal (value one) length. The real world has indeterminite step lengths (usually value one) and contains the possibility of a wild leap in times of acute stress.

Pg. 290: Popper. [paraphrase] "Philosophy collapses into empty sophistry without being based around problems that lie outside the strict philosophical domain."

...Continued...

Progress and Invention.

Truly, nothing mankind has achieved in the span they have existed, can be classed as new. Newness, true originality, is impossible to the conscious seeker. It is impossible to create something that bears no relation to anything that has gone before, from material already extant. It is impossible to have an idea that bears no relation to anything already imagined. Originality, in its pure form, cannot exist.

Try it if you don't believe me. Do this simple thing for me: Remember something. Right now.

Did you draw a blank..? I did - without any prompt to spur a particular memory, there are no memories.

Now, try think of something that is truly unrelated to anything you have previously experienced.

...
...
...

Another blank..?

And yet, look around at all the things we have now, that didn't exist in any concrete shape or form even a hundred years ago. They are perhaps not truly new, but certainly new enough to remark upon. How did that happen if the best an inventor can do is to recombine endlessly previously percieved forms and objects..? Mash together ideas already thought of..?

Aha. Whilst previously unpercieved forms do not exist, the emergent properties invoked by their close assembly, do. And here lies originality. Not entirely random, not entirely unknown in nature, but not entirely not so. Who would have guessed that saltpetter from a midden, and the burnt blackness of wood, would explode into the world and cause death by the millions..? The Egyptians had batteries of a sort, in jars. Who would have guessed that the force in those jars combined with filaments of metal almost too fine for the eye to see, would provide so much light..?

Newness of a sort.

But - we have not changed, have not gotten any smarter, since the days when fire was a new invention and chipped flint was all the rage. Why then, do we have so many new and complex toys..? Surely mankind has progressed..?

Of course not. Same stupid monkeys we ever were. The only thing that differs between then and now is that there are more of us. And this, believe it or not, is enough.

Here, take four dice. I want you to roll them so their fallen faces show six sixes.

Impossible. Of course. Not enough dice. Here, take six dice - roll away. (Took you ages didn't it, astronomic odds).

Here - take five billion dice. Now the chances of six of them showing a six are not just a near certainty, but the odds against there not being six sixes among them are unimaginably high.

Technology progresses, discoveries are made, building from a multitude of previous discoveries, not because humanity has gotten smarter along the way, but because they have grown so numerous that the odds against a particular discovery being made, however strange and tortuous the route toward it may be, are shortened to the point of near certainty.

Einstein was the right guy, in the right place, at the right time to draw the right connections between conceptual objects already extant. Not only that but he also had the right kind of brain, the right kind of education, the right kind of life experiences, all at the right times to shape him into the right kind of awareness to make them. But then again, sooner or later, someone was bound to.

And it is the same with any discovery.

Linear rational progress is a mirage. Scientific or conceptual discovery is a simple function of probability, not intelligence. And as the population grows, we load the odds in our favour. The smartest man in the room truly is everybody. We individuals are the merest cogs in the collective mind.

Sentient awareness acts as a catalyst, increasing the probability of complex events and objects coming into being. Without human awareness, even something so simple as tea in a china cup, would be so unlikely as to never occur by unguided chance. Technology, for some obscure reason is classed as 'unnatural', whereas things like horns and teeth are 'natural' - what is a horn save organic technology..?

'Natural' and 'unnatural' are really simple expressions of probability.

...Continued...