there  could  be  snakes  in  here

'I think in a line — but there is the potential of the plane.' This perhaps was what great art was: a momentary apprehension of the plane at a point in the line. — Charles Williams A theory is a machine for answering a class of questions. — Judea Pearl What philosophers and social thinkers and literary critics call their "theories" do not often merit the word. Rather, these people lay out models - with all the artificiality, partiality and temporariness that implies, and seldom the precision. A model is a tool for making sense of things, for filtering out things in self-defence, and is not necessarily a general claim about reality, a truth-machine. (Some of them agree with this low estimate, like the post-modernists. People don't realise that post-modernists are often self-deprecating - some of them even call their works little: Minima Moralia , Minima Memoria , les petits récits .) These theories are actually language games . O.K. Except th...

" Qualitative difference ": a change so obvious even unaided human perception can spot it. But what about differences that are only obvious to people in the know? The difference between this and this is obscure to my parents, but clear to me, for instance. A simple and I think honest answer is that knowledge is indeed a perceptual aid. Call qualitative differences which require knowledge to detect, Simonian differences . (This is after Herbert Simon's studies of the excellent acquired intuitions of e.g. firefighters and chess grandmasters .) Thus: Nas vs Slightly Remastered Nas: quantitative Nas vs Rakim: Simonian qualitative Nas vs Big Pun : qualitative

How much of human psychology could aliens reconstruct from our art? Let's say they have every work of fiction, but no documentaries, no datasets, nor even any archaeological digs to go on. Nothing uncontrived . So, postmodern media would be very useful to them: as a proof of our self-consciousness, but also since it gives clear indication of what we regard as markers of fiction. A knowing wink to camera is data about fiction given within fiction . Anything which is spoofed, anything which a loud narrator makes reference to, is a trope and can thus help to file away convention in favour of mimesis. But I think the answer is "surprisingly little". As Picasso says, "art washes off the dust of everyday life": i.e. it is wilfully unrepresentative and heightened, and not psychologically real. Even if we gave the aliens all good art ever, there would still be large and systematic inaccuracies. The biggest missing things are repetition, our biological overhea...

Politics Total terrorism death toll 70% . Total malarial death toll > 350,000. 90% . Total malarial death toll 80% . No terrorist attack causes >100 deaths in the developed world (HDI > 0.8): 80% No terrorist attack causes >500 deaths in the less developed world: 70%. No terrorist attack outside of Iraq and Syria causes >300 deaths: 55%. No country will leave the Eurozone. 80% Fewer refugees admitted to European countries in 2017 than 2016. 80% Front National will gain 30+ seats in the French legislative election. 80% Le Pen will lose the presidential election. 55% Front National will not end up in power. 80% Partij voor de Vrijheid will gain 5+ seats in the Dutch election. 70% PVV will not end up in power. 80% . Alternative für Deutschland will gain 40+ seats in the German election. 70% AfD will not end up in power 70% . No second Scottish independence referendum announced. 80% There will be no formal agreement on UK membership of the common market, p...

(c) Tom Gauld (2014) When physicists do mathematics, they don’t say they’re doing “number science”. They’re doing math. If you’re analyzing data, you’re doing statistics. You can call it data science or informatics or analytics or whatever, but it’s still statistics... You may not like what some statisticians do. You may feel they don’t share your values. They may embarrass you. But that shouldn’t lead us to abandon the term “statistics”. – Karl Broman what makes data science special and distinct from statistics is that this data product gets incorporated back into the real world, and users interact with that product, and that generates more data: a feedback loop. This is very different from predicting the weather... – Cathy O'Neil / Rachel Schutt "Data science" is the latest name for an old pursuit: the attempt to make computers give us new knowledge. * In computing's short history, there have already been about 10 words for this activity (and god kn...

"This isn't right . Imagine: we give them a loss function, without a utility function. They can't feel good; only less bad." "It's the same with us, tho. What we call utility is just the absence of loss." "I'm not sure that's true. Pride feels to be more than the absence of shame; love is more than absence of loneliness." "There's a fairly big gap between your two examples. And it's hard to think clearly when strong pleasure or pain is implicated." "Nevertheless, yours is the view requiring a mass redefinition of natural language to make two entities become one." "I don't mind. Even if they're not identical, we can still capture most of all value by reducing harm." "I don't see how you can know that." "Obvs I don't know it infallibly, but anyway it can't hurt ." "You might be more ambitious than such moral hedging." "Yes, as so...

'Everything is PR' has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’ as a blunder. Just as Cherkesov [head of the Russian DEA] was investigating Patrushev [head of the new KGB] , so Patrushev supported those who were fighting Cherkesov. So when the FSB heard about Yana's story, they made sure the police didn't close down the demonstrations [for Yana's freedom] , that the right newspapers and TV channels covered the protests. This was one of the reasons ‘liberal’ papers and TV channels existed, to give one power broker a weapon to hit another power broker with. ...the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. T...

Three very different things I've seen in the last week (I also accidentally wrote an overview of anti-scepticism in the middle there): 12 Angry Men (1957) (Lumet) 96mins real-time shot entirely in two rooms! Your faith in the democratic process shaken and soothed! Epistemology and that! This film has no quotable lines. There is no sex. I can't link to youtube to give you a chuckle out of it, or even a quick impression. And just like in the real world, there is no action in it , only behaviour. But it's nevertheless one of the most tense and violence-laden things I've ever seen. I don't know if this was how men in the 50s always reacted to each other, but it's fucking terrifying. The central theme is the unknown which is too-quickly taken for the evident - the confusion of opinion with knowledge . The unknown in question is the guilt of a young man, doomed to the Chair by an impatient and prejudiced jury. The crowing and haste of the absolutists is made worse by...