Archive for August, 2007

Games

Friday, August 17th, 2007

Everyone gets where they are for different reasons. The enjoyment of games goes beyond winning. Life has a game-like aspect to it – one can fail and find it fair, or win and find it unfair. There is such a thing as too much humility. Excess humility retards learning. When too much to attributed to luck, not enough credit / blame is assigned to an action, and the causal truth takes longer to become clear.

People lie about luck with each other. People have personal convictions about what they/others deserved or not, causal reality as they see it. Those convictions are often impossible to communicate, because of how large the assumption base is. Yet we operate, because we do not start ab initio when thinking about things. When we do use logic, it is often done in an incremental, as opposed to the minimalist, manner. This is in stark constrast to the emphasis in formal education, where the right way is in general minimalist. The minimalist approach emphasizes objectivity and independence of components, and advocates that little things be made of big things. For the minimalist, the prime problems are those of rule discovery and complex deduction. As evidenced by all the researchers with low pay, these problems are not very susceptible to the parallelization algorithm we call money.

What do I mean by incremental logic? I mean the comparative approach that should be used when dealing with large complex systems. As an actor in a larger problem solver, it is sufficient impetus for action that one knows the action will improve the knowledge base, and to the extent a complete analysis can be avoided, it should be.

Shouts and Murmurs

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

There is a section in the New Yorker called Shouts and Murmurs. It’s pretty good.

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