100 Best Things on YouTube

Altogether better than the new TV season.


(Via linkmachinego)

That Jesus was a Hippie

The conservatives decide it's time to rewrite the Bible without all that libral stuff in it, like Love Your Neighbor and such.

The Medium and the Message

Paul Graham grasps the fact that the publishing business model is not about charging for content. Most publishing income comes from two main sources: people willing to pay for the medium (you pay for the paper) and people trying to make money off of the information (e.g., businesses trying to reach you).

There's a third way to make money of off media: ancillary income from experiential goods (you buy a ticket to a concert, plus a t-shirt and a beer while you're there).

Everything else is just fighting with your customers, who are quite happy to go somewhere else.

It's interesting to note that this strategy for the media industry revolves around two maxims: better embodiment makes for more valuble content (so concentrate on upgrading user experience) and Don't Be Evil. The alternative strategy is to make cheaper stuff and try to grab all of the user surplus for the producers. Which do you think will get tried first? Which do you think will ultimately win?

After the Revolution

Taking a look back at Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which provoked something of a paradigm shift in the history & philosophy of science.

The main threads of Kuhn's approach to science are well known. Science really gets underway when a scientific tradition has succeeded on formulating a paradigm. A paradigm includes a diverse set of elements -- conceptual schemes, research techniques, bodies of accepted data and theory, and embedded criteria and processes for the validation of results. Paradigms are not subject to testing or justification; in fact, empirical procedures are embedded within paradigms. Paradigms are in some ways incommensurable -- Kuhn alluded to gestalt psychology to capture the idea that a paradigm structures our perceptions of the world. There are no crucial experiments -- instead, anomalies accumulate and eventually the advocates of an old paradigm die out and leave the field to practitioners of a new paradigm. Like Polanyi, Kuhn emphasizes the concrete practical knowledge that is a fundamental component of scientific education. By learning to use the instruments and perform the experiments, the budding scientist learns to see the world in a paradigm-specific way. (Alexander Bird provides a good essay on Kuhn in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

A couple of questions are particularly interesting today, approaching fifty years after the writing of the book. One is the question of origins: where did Kuhn's basic intuitions come from? Was the idea of a paradigm a bolt from the blue, or was there a comprehensible line of intellectual development that led to it? There certainly was a strong tradition of study of the history of science from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century; but Kuhn was the first to bring this tradition into explicit dialogue with the philosophy of science.

Highbanks Part II

Highbanks Park

Before the fall.

How Bob Dylan

Got where he was going.

Coup Plotters

Michaelangelo Signorile gets some verrry strange calls, including flakes who think they're going to overthrow the government with 200 loons from Oklahoma.



...and this poor woman.

Finished marathon True Blood season 1 box set session last night. The supporting roles really make that show hum--that and the opening credits.

Overconfidence

Dominic Johnson and James Fowler have created a model to explain the evolutionary underpinnings of overconfidence:

By creating a mathematical model of the way overconfident individuals compete against ordinary individuals, they show that there is a clear advantage in overconfidence.

In fact, if the potential reward is at least twice as great as the cost of competing, then overconfidence is the best strategy. In fact, overconfidence is actually advantageous on average, because it boosts ambition, resolve, morale, and persistence. In other words, overconfidence is the best way to maximize benefits over costs when risks are uncertain.

...

But it is Johnson and Fowler's predictions that are most worrying. Their model implies that optimal overconfidence increases with the magnitude of uncertainty. So the greater the risk, the more overconfident individuals should become.

Yes, Yes, "Correlation Does Not Equal Causation"...

...so what does?

Causal inference in statistics, a commentary on Judea Pearl's review article on the topic.

Burning Man

Timelapse photography. Reminds me of the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Evolution (Burning Man time lapses) from Delrious on Vimeo.

Waves are Toys from God

Forthcoming Clay Marzo documentary, "Just Add Water". Clay is a world class surfer, diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome.



Elsewhere, Jonah Lehrer profiles Clay in Outside magazine, discussing the advantages Asperger's gives Clay, including the ability to focus on surfing for 8-9 hours at a time.

Pattern Recognition

A neuroimaging study supports the hippocampus-first model of high level pattern recognition/concept formation, in which the hippocampus "creates and stores concepts", and then sends the information to the ventomedial prefrontal cortex for decision making, learning and output.

Torture Memo Roundup: the Case Against the Lawyers

Where we are now.

Kelly Link Interview

by Red Fence

Magical Thinking

Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg on the Rational Expectations Hypothesis and its discontents.

the assumptions that underpin these theories are largely inscrutable to those without a Ph.D. in economics. Indeed, the debate is full of terms that mean one thing to the uninitiated and quite another to economists.

Consider “rationality.” Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “reasonableness.” By contrast, for economists, a “rational individual” is not merely reasonable; he or she is someone who behaves in accordance with a mathematical model of individual decision-making that economists have agreed to call “rational.”

The centrepiece of this standard of rationality, the so-called “Rational Expectations Hypothesis”, presumes that economists can model exactly how rational individuals comprehend the future. In a bit of magical thinking, it supposes that each of the many models devised by economists provides the “true” account of how market outcomes, such as asset prices, will unfold over time.

The economics literature is full of different models, each one assuming that it adequately captures how all rational market participants make decisions. Although the free-market Chicago school, neo-Keynesianism, and behavioural finance are quite different in other respects, each assumes the same REH-based standard of rationality.

In other words, REH-based models ignore markets’ very raison d’etre: no one, as Friedrich Hayek pointed out, can have access to the “totality” of knowledge and information dispersed throughout the economy. Similarly, as John Maynard Keynes and Karl Popper showed, we cannot rationally predict the future course of our knowledge. Today’s models of rational decision-making ignore these well-known arguments.

Glee-The Football Team Dances

This show will do great as long as it keeps making episodes like this one.

Mr. Pepys hath a Clean House

...and feels rather good about it.

Origin of Stupid

Brilliant refutation of a Kirk Cameron/Roy comfort produced, bowdlerized edition Origin of Species. The internet wins.