What is your IQ?
125. Same as Feynman's.
Ask @afoolswisdom:
Do you really think you are a wise fool? Like a buffoon?
Yes. I find the wise take themselves too seriously, and fools too hard on themselves.
Question elaborating on your logic versus meaning comment: http://paste.kde.org/pvrhjhhtx/w5wlhm - pass: meaningful
Yes that sort of meaning is individually fragile. Yes it should be pursued anyway. But not to the exclusion of other things.
If you have read Taleb's book it says in there that fragility at a lower level is often antifragility at a higher level of organization. Antifragility is had at the expense of the fragility of trials/hypotheses/components/etc. So you might care about many individual fragile things, but at least not all of them will succumb to catastrophe all at once. Not often anyways...
So you see, this does not always save us. Life/evolution is antifragile precisely because it has such callous disregard for organisms or even entire species. In final analysis I don't think there's an answer. Value and reality constantly butt heads and erode each other. It's just how it is.
If you have read Taleb's book it says in there that fragility at a lower level is often antifragility at a higher level of organization. Antifragility is had at the expense of the fragility of trials/hypotheses/components/etc. So you might care about many individual fragile things, but at least not all of them will succumb to catastrophe all at once. Not often anyways...
So you see, this does not always save us. Life/evolution is antifragile precisely because it has such callous disregard for organisms or even entire species. In final analysis I don't think there's an answer. Value and reality constantly butt heads and erode each other. It's just how it is.
Dear Sark. Long time reader/lurker, would love to get in touch. Kindred spirit. Couldn't find a contact. How can I reach you, more privately than Twitter? Email/PGP? Jabber? sip/voip? I hope your (our) preference for locality doesn't screen off contact with some of the finest far people from the int
oon.guo.liang@gmail.com
That's with google+ and hangout too.
That's with google+ and hangout too.
"What does not make sense to me makes me stronger." Why? How exactly? (Yeah. If you're right, I shouldn't be asking.) You probably mean pervasive, long-standing Chesterton fences. Tradition. Religion. But without some qualifier the statement would include modern art paintings and Zulu proverbs fro
No idea why I said this. Or any recollection that I did.
"You reject the past only out of an insecurity in your ability to forge a better future." Isn't that the opposite? You embrace the past to compensate for a lack of hope in the future, and when the future looks wonderful, you don't spend much time in nostalgic recollection.
If you could improve on the past then you would just go out and do it, and not bitch about it unproductively.
"Explanation is not prediction because the coarse grainings at their respective joints are incompatible." Can you explain this further? Or predict differences I should notice after understanding it?
We predict because we care about concrete outcomes, because these outcomes matter to us in terms of what we need to survive or what we value. Whereas we explain because we care about the explanation itself. Now the explanation is not just some set of outcomes. It *does* specify some set of outcomes but it also satisfies other criteria, like computability, elegance, etc. So it is also a function of the explanation machinery rather than only of the outcomes it explains.
An analogy would be that a property (explanation) is a set of finite binary strings (explanandum). Now set of all finite binary strings is denumerable, so its powerset is uncountable. So there are plenty more properties than strings. Yet we use strings as explanations. So we want our properties to be computable at least, otherwise we wouldn't even be able to provide an explanation. So bringing it back, the outcomes we care about in prediction have no need to behave as well as we want them to when we are only playing a game of explanation, instead of trying to survive or bring forth a world we care about.
An analogy would be that a property (explanation) is a set of finite binary strings (explanandum). Now set of all finite binary strings is denumerable, so its powerset is uncountable. So there are plenty more properties than strings. Yet we use strings as explanations. So we want our properties to be computable at least, otherwise we wouldn't even be able to provide an explanation. So bringing it back, the outcomes we care about in prediction have no need to behave as well as we want them to when we are only playing a game of explanation, instead of trying to survive or bring forth a world we care about.
Hello afoolswisdom. https://p.boxnet.eu/60982/ Initially those were selected questions for Taleb. But you could be as competent or more to give them a shot. None seem trivial but maybe you can tackle some of them? Solved questions are beautiful.
Hello. Thanks for your questionis. I'm going to answer no.1 first, and maybe answer the rest later.
So the way I see it. Why we want to be exposed to certain stressors is because they are informative of the distribution of stressors we will experience in the normal course of our lives. So a marathon runner would require a different set of stressors than a sprinter, say. Overstabilization and the naive removal of stressors is bad only because they ignore the long tail in the distribution. Take second-hand smoke. If you *really* will never ever in the rest of your life be exposed to second-hand smoke ever again. Then sure, you really don't need the stressor of some second-hand smoke once a week. But that is hubris. Nobody is that insulated from smoking. Which is why we need stressors, to prepare ourselves for black swans.
So the way I see it. Why we want to be exposed to certain stressors is because they are informative of the distribution of stressors we will experience in the normal course of our lives. So a marathon runner would require a different set of stressors than a sprinter, say. Overstabilization and the naive removal of stressors is bad only because they ignore the long tail in the distribution. Take second-hand smoke. If you *really* will never ever in the rest of your life be exposed to second-hand smoke ever again. Then sure, you really don't need the stressor of some second-hand smoke once a week. But that is hubris. Nobody is that insulated from smoking. Which is why we need stressors, to prepare ourselves for black swans.
Do you ever worry that your tweets and posts maybe utterly worthless?
I don't really care. A lot of them are in fact obsolete. My knowledge is embedded in how I live my life as I continually adapt to my circumstance, and not in what I say at any given time. Some people might find the tweets helpful, but otherwise they should simply ignore them.
We are told to burn our ships because too much choice is bad (paradox of choice, et cetera). Without options you have to focus and you can 'cultivate abandon' towards that choice. Then be happier. But isn't that a fragilizing action because you throw away redundancy? Isn't optionality what is needed
Good question! But I think a distinction can be made between choices and options. Choices are sorta symmetrical in that you need to make an active decision to select one of them. Options you can either choose to exercise or let leave be. To take an example, someone into their favorite activity can easily get into a state of flow, but can stop at anytime whenever they feel like it. As I like to say they have 'choice in choice'. Abandon is really about exercising options according to ones whim, and not being forced to make choices imposed externally.
I don't think robustness or antifragility lies in having choices. That's looking at it from a predictive stance: what choices do I have conditional on various possible future outcomes. Whereas to take a nonpredictive stance, you make sure you are either robust to whatever disasters nature can come up with or can exercise optionality to even profit in such cases.
Choices are rarely overwhelming if they are not choices conditioned upon choices conditioned upon choices and so on. Taking a nonpredictive stance, one avoids this exponential proliferation of nauseating possibilities.
I don't think robustness or antifragility lies in having choices. That's looking at it from a predictive stance: what choices do I have conditional on various possible future outcomes. Whereas to take a nonpredictive stance, you make sure you are either robust to whatever disasters nature can come up with or can exercise optionality to even profit in such cases.
Choices are rarely overwhelming if they are not choices conditioned upon choices conditioned upon choices and so on. Taking a nonpredictive stance, one avoids this exponential proliferation of nauseating possibilities.
Paul McCartney said: "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." What do you think about it?
People will simply not go near transparent slaughterhouses? Values are complex, what brandishing slaughterhouses at people's faces elicits is a distortion of their values.
Why don't you have thousands of followers and when you do get them, will you repeat the same wisdoms or have you an infinite supply? You are excellent, by the way. Sorry about multiple Qs
Thanks. Well, I suspect people simply don't understand what I'm trying to say. I do try to repeat myself whenever I kinda sense that people don't understand something. But since very few actually ask any questions I kinda have to guess. Of course, what I can certainly do is to explain everything from scratch. But that is a lot of work which I hope to find some time to do... sometime in the future.
More cynically, I suspect people expect what I say to fall within the expectations of certain "sports". A term I use to mean any socially reasonably well-defined competitive activity. What I do is more like Calvinball. There is a criteria: more often usefulness than truth. It isn't anything goes. But the rules are not set. So it's hard to judge if I'm actually performing well or badly. Hence I might as well not be doing anything important at all!
More cynically, I suspect people expect what I say to fall within the expectations of certain "sports". A term I use to mean any socially reasonably well-defined competitive activity. What I do is more like Calvinball. There is a criteria: more often usefulness than truth. It isn't anything goes. But the rules are not set. So it's hard to judge if I'm actually performing well or badly. Hence I might as well not be doing anything important at all!