Nothing can be both boring and truly important. 7/29/16
To perpetuate a lie, you must whisper it, not shout it. 7/27/16
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The expression “my friend”: for a name dropper, it is anyone important; for a politician, anyone who does not vote against him/her; for regular people, a friend; in the mob, “a friend of ours” is another mafia member.
For me it is anyone I run into at a party and can’t remember the first name. 7/27/16
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For those of you on a hot summer day want to stroll on a beach, this is the way to do it.
It takes some training; rehearse in the privacy of your living room before doing it in public.
(Aldo Maccione, Jacques Brel, etc…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTm0X93l8vk
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Turkey is, after 100 years, a complete failure of top-down secularization. So are Iraq and Syria. You keep pushing religion under the rug, via bureaucrats; it comes back with a vengeance.
Iran has, somewhat, the opposite situation. 7/21/16
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An illustration of the notion of minimal type 2 error (no false negative): At the Congress of 1934, for the critical confidence ballot, a minority of the 1288 delegates (perhaps a quarter) voted against Stalin.
Stalin ended up trying to eliminating, during the great purge, not just those who were presumed to have voted against him, but all the delegates who were present. 7/20/16
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This picture is worth an indefinite amount of words.
It shows why GMOs are *not* traditional breeding. Few people trained traditionally get complex systems (i.e. those with interractions). But there is a growing number of young people who “get it”, particularly when familiar with P/NP in computer science.
Finally I looked at Monsanto’s financials and it shows GMOs are contracting; as a “technology” GMs are dying and no complicated technology survives unless it is multiplicative. Meanwhile organic is growing rapidly.
The PP page is here
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.ht…
—
Rahul Gotswani commented on the drawing by Joe Norman for our paper.
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Never argue with people in private (you will not convince them); argue in public to convince others. 7/12/16
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Another explanation of Scale Dependent Properties:
Some may believe that *armies create wars* but nobody sane believes that *police create robberies*. 7/7/16
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SKIN IN THE GAME
Since more and more of academia is becoming a ritualistic publishing* game that maps less and less to real research, we should force people who want to do “research” to first have a Real World day job, or at least spend 10 years as: lens maker, patent clerc, mafia operator, professional gambler, postman, prison guard, medical doctor, uber driver, militia member, social security clerc, trial lawyer, farmer, restaurant chef, high volume waiter, firefighter (my favorite), lighthouse keeper, etc., while they are doing their initial research.
It is a filtering, BS expurgating mechanism.
I for my part spent the first 21 years in a full-time highly demanding extremely stressful job while studying, researching, and writing my first 3 books at night, and it lowered (in fact, eliminated) my tolerance for fake research.
*I borrow from Saifedean Ammous the apt description “ritualistic game”. 7/6/16
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Real World Risk Institute LLC Workshop Announcement. Dear friends, we have:
1) Changed location to a huge room rented from… the Masonic Lodge in NYC, on 23rd St between 5th and 6th Ave.
2) Changed the date of RWRI 3 to October 3-7 2016
3) Changed the non-Antifragile part of the program to add Information, Cybersecurity, Big Data, Complexity (in place of technical finance)
4) Added more scholarship slots.
