We have been fighting charlatans since the dawn of civilization
Asides
Valuable advice from great people, 2: Mark Kac told Benoit Mandelbrot: “Stop writing papers. You are confusing us more and more. Write a book!” (which was not considered a scientific contribution, in fact counted in reverse). Hence “The Fractal Geometry of Nature”. https://amazon.com/Fractal-Geometry-Nature-Benoit-Mandelbrot
Valuable advice from great people, 1: On the importance of living in a Boring Place, decrease external dimensionality. Descartes could not live in Paris because he had too many interesting friends. He moved to Belgium and Sweden (then very very poor and rural) so he could reduce noise of ideas. And he also did turn down a university position as too distracting. (One can enumerate accounts: Jules Vernes also left Paris for Nantes, partly for family reasons, mainly because it was boring enough… but his argument was “good for a day trip to Paris”)
An observation that people who live permanently in an adoptive country tend to progressively generalize the bad and particularize the good, that is, attribute the bad traits in people they encounter to the national trait of the natives, and the good things to the individual. This holds equally well for French people living in the U.S. as it does for Americans living in France.
To clarify (once again), the central idea of the INCERTO is: be as skeptical as possible about your knowledge of the world, and as certain as possible about what constitutes wise action, whattodoaboudit. So embedded in the idea is that (positive) knowledge about the world is incomplete, transitory, continuously revised, but wisdom (what to do about knowledge) doesn’t change.
SOME BS DETECTION – I feel compelled to debunk a deceitful “experiment” (actually a total scam) because many many of my friends fell for it. The experiment illustrates the ludic fallacy (that is, a reduction of real life to an oversimplified, domain-dependent experiment giving results often opposite to reality). -We are shown identical twins, one chewing gum, the other completely idle (or trying to be so). We are told that the majority of people impart positive qualities to the one who is chewing gum … and that the experiment was done with a “large n” of twins. But these results come from the fact that one of the twins is animated while the other one is frozen; it has nothing to do with gum –plus the fact that someone standing still in front of a camera looks devoid of human qualities. -Note that the chewing gum industry is financing the “experiment”. -To make the experiment “real” or “ecological”, you need to film the twins in real life doing real things, only one of the two chewing gum. – GENERALIZING: In a nutshell, although this is not a real experiment, it shows in a carricatual way why many academic papers in social science are BS in spite of looking like a “controlled experiment”. PS- Most research on biases in the evaluation of small probabilities fall into the same class of errors.
Watching soccer (football) is punishingly boring unless you root for one side. *** (Without an emotional draw it is literally impossible to follow the game.)
There are two myths that prevail in academic circles (hence the general zeitgeist) because of mental contagion and confirmatory effects (simply from the way researchers look at data and the way it is disseminated): 1) That people are overly concerned by hierarchy (and pecking order), and that hierarchy plays a real role in life, a belief generalized from the fact that *some* people care about hierarchy *most the time* (most people may care about hierarchy *some of the time* but it does not mean hierarchy is a driver). The problem is hierarchy plays a large role zero-sum environments like academia and corrupt economic regimes (meaning someone wins at the expense of others) so academics find it natural so they tend to see it in real life and environments where if may not be prevalent. Many many people don’t care and there is no need to pathologize them as “not motivated” –academics who publish tend to be “competitive” and “competitive” in a zero-sum environment is deadly. I haven’t seen any study looking at things the other way. 2) That “competition” plays a large role compared to *cooperation* in evolutionary settings –of course if you want ruthless competition you will find examples and can model it with bad math. The latter point is extremely controversial, Wilson and Nowak have been savagely attacked for their papers (with >130 signatures contesting it) and, what is curious NOBODY was able to debunk the math (very very very rigorous backup material). If Nowak/Wilson were wrong someone would have shown where, and in spite of the outpour of words nobody did. (Hint: whenever I see “math” with linear regression, my BS-detector gets fired up. See commentary on “scientists” and regression in SILENT RISK)
Some confusion about the silver rule as I presented it two days ago, to an extremely active and rich debate (if it is troll free it is because trolls and “uninformed” commentators are vanishing from this page thanks to systematic zapping). The Silver Rule Under Uncertainty requires *skin-in-the game*, so “you can only expose others to risks that you are taking yourself”, in the sense that “we cannot see adverse consequences of all actions, but should there be a negative one I will pay the price and will be eventually incapacitated”. So there is an evolutionary argument that those who systematically cause harm to others, willingly or unwillingly, will eventually exit the system –along with their genes. “I share the opacity of future consequences if there are potential benefits to me”. — Broadly seen, this is (probabilistic) SYMMETRY, the working title of the short book I am now working on.
Some clarity. The Golden Rule (do to others what you want them to do to you) is an invitation to interventionism, utopianism, and meddling into other people’s affairs, particularly poor nations, as represented by the the NGO clowns at TED conferences trying to “save the world”, and causing more harm with unseen side effects. Remember that Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and were following the positive Golden rule. At the personal level, I may feel good trying to nudge a vegetarian to eat raw kebbeh (Lebanese steak tartare) because I like it myself. — The Silver rule (do NOT do to others what you don’t want them to do to you) leads to a systematic way to live “doing no harm” and gives rise to a liberating type of ethics: your obligation is to pursue your personal interests provided you do not hurt others probabilistically unless you are yourself exposed, & not transfer risks to others (skin-in-the-game at all times). But, and here is the key, should there be a spillover, it will necessarily be positive. It is therefore convex.(Typical via negativa rules are convex). It separates the “self-interest” in Adam Smith from the “selfish” version. And if you want to help society, just try to benefit WHILE at least harming no one. — This distinction puts a lot of clarity behind the idea of free markets and morality. You should never have to prove that what you do is GOOD for society (hard to express in words and rationalistic framework), but you can certainly show you are NOT hurting others more than yourself via skin-in-the-game.
