Being Against Technological Progress if Futile

Ron complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization. It is inseparable from centuries of rising living standards and improvements in human rights. What a luxury to sit in a climate-controlled room with access to the sum of hu¬ man knowledge on a device in your pocket and lament how we don't work with our hands anymore! There are still plenty of places in the world where p...

 Use of an Umpire to Hide Troop Movements in a War Game

Three maps should be provided, either in separate rooms or separated from each other by screens: one for each player, and one in the centre for the Umpire.* Each Commander and his subordinates will be allowed access only to their own map, the Umpire and his assistants moving from one side to the other. [...] Whenever any portion of OIK; of the opposing forces comes within the view of the other, the corresponding blocks of the former must be placed on the map of the latter and rice ver...

 Naysmiths

Magnus broods in his black tower, peering into the depths of the Great Ocean for validation, a sign that he was right to act as he did. He will find nothing, for there is nothing to find. His actions were never his own, for he forgot the first rule of the mysteries. He let his ambition and hubris blind him to his flaws and the knowledge that there is always someone stronger and more powerful out there. I will not make that mistake. But we are still creatures of flesh and inclined to repe...

 The Importance of Comparative Alphabets

But when I had grasped the facts that spellings are often false, that words can be invented, and that explanations are often wrong, I found that worse remained behind. The science of phi- lology is comparatively modern, so that our earlier writers had no means of ascertaining principles that are now well established, and, instead of proceeding by rule, had to go blindly by guesswork, thus sowing crops of errors which have sprung up and multiplied till it requires very careful investigatio...

 Lies Propagate

Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, th...

 The Tapping Game

The tapping game is when I tap one time, you tap two times, and when I tap two times, you tap one time. Children play this game sixteen times, mixing up the times that children are asked to tap once when the experimenter taps twice, and tap twice when the experimenter taps once. In other words, the rules of the game keep changing, and the children need to apply their focus and attention to follow what’s going on. Blair says: What happens with four-year-olds is, in general, they’ll hang in...

 Kissenger Describes Sayre's law

I've been an academic and I've been a policy maker. And as a policy maker, I've had a lot of trouble from academics. Especially from the Ivy League, and I'm going to say one thing about academic politics to which Mr. Schramm referred. I formulated the rule that the intensity of academic politics and the bitterness of it is in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject their discussing. And I promise you at Harvard, they are passionately intense and the subjects are extremely unimport...

 Positive Bias in the 2-4-6 Task

The boy's expression grew more intense. "This is a game based on a famous experiment called the 2-4-6 task, and this is how it works. I have a rule - known to me, but not to you - which fits some triplets of three numbers, but not others. 2-4-6 is one example of a triplet which fits the rule. In fact... let me write down the rule, just so you know it's a fixed rule, and fold it up and give it to you. Please don't look, since I infer from earlier that you can read upside-down." The boy said ...

 Newton's Rules of Reasoning in Natural Philosophy

RULE I   We are to admit no more causes of natural things, than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say, that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain, when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.   RULE II   Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes. As to respiration in a man, and in a beast; the desce...

 Criticism is Doing You a Favor

[N]o scientist likes to be criticized. ... But you don't reply to critics: "Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. I'm very fond of it. It's done you no harm. Please don't attack it." That's not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste any neurons on what doesn't work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.