What, Why & How do we Know ?
Had this Grauniad piece bookmarked for a couple of weeks: Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. As usual the headline is misleading click-bait. Anyone could have predicted that ubiquitous speed-of-light comms was going to “accelerate” things in general – Kondratiev, Kuhn and many more already did. In fact my whole … Continue reading “Accelerationism – Careful what you wish for”
Just a bookmarking post. Hat-tip to @anitaleirfall for posting this link to Daniel Kahnemann’s “retraction” of underpowered statistical significance data in his Thinking Fast and Slow based on his earlier work with Amos Tversky. Noted previously that super-statistician Taleb had profound effect on Kahnemann. Kahnemann’s work is behind “Nudge“. (He and Tversky much referenced in Thaler … Continue reading “Nudge – (erroneous) internalisation of small (but significant) facts – Scary!”
Ergodicity is my new favourite word. Some things are ergodic, some are not, they’re non-ergodic. And rather than a definition (see also post-note below), it deserves a riff … A ubiquitous question is, does the end always justify the means or maybe no end ever justifies any & all means? You might achieve the same … Continue reading “Ergodic or non-Ergodic, that is the question.”
There was a time when I followed John Brockman’s Edge regularly, it was a great way to pick up relationships between living thinkers you already knew and admired and others you didn’t, from across unlimited intellectual fields. The great thing about the annual Edge Question is that apart from the open question, there is no … Continue reading “Hidden Concepts – Edge 2017 – Let’s play Connections instead of Bulldog”
By most people’s standards I over-use “scare-quotes”. It’s a recognition that in many contexts use of a word to name a concept is inherently “political”. All naming is identity politics. Naming the classification of any “object” is always short-hand for a whole collection of variables, simply to get a handle on the topic of conversation, … Continue reading “Classic Classification”
I’ve written before about anti-religious / anti-Islam people using the religion-is-not-race defence when accused of racism. Today Anne Marie Waters tweeted this: Quick lesson: 1) Race is genetic & does not determine values. 2) Religion is taught & does determine values. End of lesson. — Anne Marie Waters (@AMDWaters) August 14, 2017 Given that it’s … Continue reading “Religious Racism Again”
I’ve made passing reference to two Daniel Dennett pieces in recent weeks, TL/DR effectively bookmarking them for deeper reading and review at some point. In fact with Twitter and PinBoard I bookmark a lot of items these days, that I rarely get a chance to return to. There, archived, for some future-if-ever writing project. As … Continue reading “Bookmarking Amid the Chaos”
So much UK media traffic this morning. The basic “tech” news story. All the original story links below. Lots of social media feeding the PC side of it that the the guy that wrote it must have had a sexist / racist agenda. Some, but not so many including myself, pointing out he has some … Continue reading “The Google Gender & Diversity Furore”