Be Excellent To Each Other

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/what-1 ... ried-about

Some are reasonable...

2. Black swan events, and the fact that we continue to rely on models that have been proven fraudulent. – Nassem Nicholas Taleb

29. The rise of anti-intellectualism and the end of progress. “We’ve now, for the first time, got a single global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.” –Tim O’Reilly, CEO and founder of O'Reilly Media

Some are just plain weird....

13. The dearth of desirable mates is something we should worry about, for "it lies behind much human treachery and brutality.” –David M. Buss, professor of psychology at U of T

22. Catharsis is a transcendent joy that—can you repeat question? –Andrian Kreye, editor, German Daily Newspaper

81. “We should be worried about online silos. They make us stupid and hostile toward each other.” –Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia

<cough>

Interesting the amount of people who responded with "That we worry too much". I like that answer.

Conversely

132. The Singularity. That we “are curiously complacent about life as we know it getting transformed. What we should be worried about is that we're not worried.” –Max Tegmark, MIT physicist

I agree with the fear that search engines will become the arbiters of truth, and that we are all too interconnected nowdays. I think that is important. I also worry about twitter.

I still don't get what Twitter is for.

Mob justice and the hounding of those whose opinions you disagree with, it seems. And the odd comical court case.

I quite liked:

21. Not much. I ride motorcycles without a helmet. –J. Craig Venter, genomic scientist

Plus, finding out what people had for breakfast.

Promoting my website http://52games.tumblr.com

Boom!

WTF is a "black swan event"?

A catastrophic event that comes out of the blue, that afterwards is thought to have been or is rationalised as to have been inevitable in hindsight (even though it wasn't).

Shit going spectacularly bad. Unexpectedly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

You know how you see swans and they are all white? And then you see a black swan and "exclaim"Goodness me, seeing a black swan is a very rare event that I could not really have predicted through normal forecasting based upon previous experiences" and tehn you kill ands tuff the black swan and sell it for lots of money, or you end up in prison. It is kinda like that. Venture Capitalists talk of them a lot due to their need to rationalize their expenditures post event.

But what's that got to do with models who are cheating on their tax returns?

It has EVERYTHING to do with it, you fool!

I think that is one of the the most contemporous references he's ever made, you know.

I was thinking of Naomi Campbell and the blood diamonds, but the juxtaposition with "black swan" made me uneasy, in a Guardian-reader sort of way.

I'm currently reading Black Swan by Teleb, though progress is slow. The front cover makes it feel like rubber.


The book is named because ye olde people thought all swans were white. If you said a swan was anything but white you'd be laughed at. Then we discovered Australia or wherever and voila, black swans. Suddenly everyone is all "of course black swans can exist. They're like white ones, only black. Durr!"

Basically: A lot of things aren't predicted, they just happen, people muddle through and then afterwards everyone, from the people involved to historians, start lying to themselves and saying "they could see it coming", even though they wrote "I HAVEN'T A FUCKING CLUE WHY THIS IS HAPPENING" in their diaries at the time. He lived during the Lebonese war and his grandpops was Culture for minister. Apparently he nor the rest of the government really had a clue about the war, other than the fact it was happening, yet years later they'd all be pointing to concrete evidence about why this caused that. (which, whilst may be true, didn't help them predict the war at all). Another example is WWI. Lots of people say it was inevitable, but was it? What happens if the black hand hadn't shot the duke? Would it _really_ have happened, or are we just trying to find explainations for giant unpredictable clusterfucks, etc

He seems to draw parallels between this and the stock market (which he made a lot of money on). I.e. it's all random and unpredictable yet 'analysts' try to discern patterns in it or predict what'll happen and then rationalize things like the credit crunch etc, when at the time no one really had a clue and definitely couldn't predict it.

or something. Not finished it.

Pod!

Poooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood!

I'm really not sure that this black swan theory has much profound to say. It's just another kind of hindsight isn't it? What about all the times when bad things were predicted and prevented. Some things are predictable and others aren't.

I've not read it, so I can't speak for it, but I think he's trying to warn against making predictions on the unpredictable, much like a lot of economy is based on. He should be wary of black swans in all forms and always guard against them, etc.(i.e. assume the market is going to crash next week, every day). He especially hates the bell curve, because it leads people astray and into a safe zone, and then along comes a black swan.

He also seems to have observation based knowledge (and induction), as you can't observe what you haven't observed yet. An example of that is a turkey. It's born on a farm. It grows on a farm. It's fed every day. It's warm and watered. Life has been this way for an entire year. Life is, as far as the turkey can tell, going to go on like that. Until it gets chopped up for dinner. Didn't see that coming, did ya turkey? I think his idea is "try not to be the turkey".

Harry Potter is one of his examples as well. Who knew that book would catch on? It's not a terribly useful example, as the films and books aren't really that harmful.


How to avoid that? Stop basing things on observations and build in robustness...whatever that means

edit: one interesting thing I have taken away from it is that the more you read about some things, such as current events, the less you'll learn. Often a quick overview is just as good as reading every single newspaper on the issue.

a black swan event it nothing more than a chance occurance. it can be good or bad, but a 1 in a trillion event.

Yeah. My job is to try to ensure my company avoids said swans. Or, more often, to ensure that if a 'black swan event' happens, it doesn't torpedo the viability of the company. We use graphs and mathematical models and stuff, and actuaries.

Then once they've done the clever stuff, I dumb it down for the important people.

Do they always involve Natalie Portman lezzing it up?

And if not, why not?

Brilliant list (love the silo comment from Mr Wiki), and interesting that a lot of science folk are worried about, um, science.

I think:

27. That we will stop dying. –Kate Jeffery, professor of behavioural neuroscience

is my favourite. Not in a yay-I-hope-we-all-die way, but in a yeah, all of us living forever would cause just a few problems (living longer already has).

The article makes me want to read more, too!

Torchwood could sort that out though.

Heh.

I like this one best though.

78. "Don't worry; be happy" - Bobby McFerrin

"I'm worried that we all might be characters in a book" - Guybrush Threepwood

So could Kovacs.

No, not our one.

I seem to remember a good piece on Cracked.com about how it would be rubbish to live forever (or at least for a very long time).

I prefer to see us as all taking part in someone's game of a mega-lo-mania; increasing our tech levels and fighting wars. However unlike Mega-lo-Mania, they'll eventually get bored and decide to wipe us all out with asteroids, so we have to get our tech level up to a certain point, so we can sent lots of Bruce Willises off into space to sort it all out.

Did you know Die hard was originally going to be a Lethal Weapon film?

And Lethal Weapon was originally going to be a sequel to Pretty Woman.

Pretty Woman was originally going to star Eddie Murphy, but he quit the project and they replaced him with Julia Roberts.

Eddie Murphy went on to star in Shrek, which was originally going to be a prequel to The Breakfast Club.

Absolutely right. I'm Eddie Murphy, Goodnight.
\

I'm reading through the main list, rather than the abridged version, because the abridged version seems to be really inaccurate. Take John Tooby's, for instance, which is one of the more interesting ones I've read thus far.



But that's not really what he's talking about. Especially near the end where he's talking about social cohesion and how a lot of science is done badly simply because we don't want to change our methods, which match up with lots of the other commentators (e.g. Teleb) about how we're in denial of our need to change some of the fundamental ways we use and acquire knowledge.



Is also completely inaccurate. (He actually does wear a helmet ) He's talking about people not being immunised are giant twats, yet they seem to think it's a choice they're allowed to make, like not wearing a helmet on a motorcycle.

I'm only about 1/6th of the way through, but it's interesting that a lot of them are about how the bulk of humanity are fucking scrots and will somehow result in the end of us all. A lot are about how computers and the accessibility of technology are killing human civilisation, usually through imbalance.

It's a depressing read.

I think we need more faith in people. thinking otherwise makes me feel sad for those thinking it.