26 AUG 2024 by ideonexus
Quantifying the Rate of Change
We live in an era that involves an extraordinary amount of change. To see this, consider the rate of global economic growth, which in recent decades averaged around 3 percent per year.51 This is historically unprecedented. For the first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence, global growth was close to 0 percent per year; in the agricultural era that increased to around 0.1 percent, and it accelerated from there after the Industrial Revolution. It’s only in the last hundred years that the ... 1 
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notes28 FEB 2021 by ideonexus
Why Automation Didn't Result in Increased Leisure in the ...
Back then, many theorists believed that a progressive reduction of work time was the inevitable byproduct of mechanization and increased efficiency. Even John M. Keynes, noted father of modern mass-consumption economics, argued in 1931 that, within two generations, industry would satisfy the real needs of humanity and lead to “three-hour shifts or a 'fifteen-hour week.” This reduction in work time, said Keynes, would allow us to “devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.” ...Folksonomies: automation leisure
Folksonomies: automation leisure
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notes30 DEC 2016 by ideonexus
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...Folksonomies: disputation contrarian
Folksonomies: disputation contrarian
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notes19 DEC 2014 by ideonexus
How the Finance Industry Hurts the Economy
In perhaps the starkest illustration, economists from Harvard University and the University of Chicago wrote in a recent paper that every dollar a worker earns in a research field spills over to make the economy $5 better off. Every dollar a similar worker earns in finance comes with a drain, making the economy 60 cents worse off.
[...]
...the growth of complex financial products has served primarily to boost income for the firms themselves, Philippon said. A new paper from researchers in t... 1 notes
notes01 SEP 2014 by ideonexus
Literature Asks Questions without Offering Answers
Even when writers profess to know nothing about the inner man, they often make the profession in a way which suggests that they really know plenty When D. H. Lawrence says (in his essay on Benjamin Franklin) "The soul of man is a dark forest," he says it with a kind of knowing Satanic smirk, so that the profession of ignorance actually becomes a species of knowledge. When I first read that ominous Lawrence sentence I was young and it was news to me that my soul was a dark forest. For several ... 1 notes
notes27 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Why Economists Will Continue to be Wrong
Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality--he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn't. It turned out that there were many ...
1 They make models based on past data, and when they fail to predict the future, they adjust them to match the new past data. The problem is that so many models will match the past data, there could be no end to the number of models they throw out.
18 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
Gender is Not Binary
he gender binary is the artificial division of the world into things that are "masculine" or "for men" and things that are "feminine" or "for women". One of the starkest ways to think of this is to consider the phrase "opposite sexes/genders" (as opposed to "different sexes/genders"), when both men and women are human beings with fundamentally many more commonalities than differences.
The division is artificial in several ways:
much of it is very clearly socially constructed. For example,...
1 Interesting concept from feminist and homosexual literature. The scientific point of view on this is that human males and females are dimorphic to various degrees.
21 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
von Neumann Correctly Hypothesizes How Memory Works
The question of the physical embodiment of this memory remains. For this, various authorrs have suggested a variety of solutions. It has beeen proposed to assume that the thresholds—orr, more broadly stated, the stimulation criteria—^f or various nerve cells change with time as functions of the previous history of that cell. Thus frequent use of a nerve cell might lower its threshold, i.e. ease the requirements of its stimulation, and the like. If this were true, the memory would reside i... 1 notes
notesNeurons that get used more often become easier to use. He's just speculating, but his description is spot on.
28 AUG 2011 by ideonexus
The Difference Between Science and Pseudoscience
What I had in mind was that his previous observations may not have been much sounder than this new one; that each in its turn had been interpreted in the light of "previous experience," and at the same time counted as additional confirmation. What, I asked myself, did it confirm? No more than that a case could be interpreted in the light of a theory. But this meant very little, I reflected, since every conceivable case could be interpreted in the light Adler's theory, or equally of Freud's. I... 1 notes
notesScience makes risky predictions, predicting things that the theory must be strong in order to prove. Popper compares early psychology and its explanations of human behavior that work in all cases with Einstein's theory of relativity and it's risky predictions.
29 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
The Ponzi-Scheme Meme
Profit-motivated designer viruses, many of which are completely legal and aboveboard today, have their shady origins in the crooked Ponzi scheme.* Charles Ponzi was an Italian immigrant who opened a business in Boston in 1919 called the Securities Exchange Company. He offered to repay people's investments in 90 days with 50 percent interest: an investment of $10 would bring $15 in three months.
His story was that he bought international postal reply coupons in Europe and, due to currency flu... 1 notes
notesHow it works and how it spread.
