simpson’s paradox I always had trouble understanding this. Here I seek an example so I can finally get it. (I had trouble with Monty Hall problem too, until I came up with a satisfactory intuition) monty hall simpson but my first choice was just as likely as the others! monty didn’t change the probability that my choice was correct you’re right! he didn’t change the probability that your choice was correct. but he removed one option on the side of your 1st choice being wrong, thereby putting those two unchanged probabaili You always have 2/3 chance your first choice was wrong. That’s why you’re right that the probabilities don’t change. it’s just that now Monty put those 2/3 chance you were wrong into one option monty gives you information “but monty didn’t change the probability that my first choice was correct!” ...

We’re getting somewhere

Timing is Everything.

be an artist Ray Bradbury says intellect is a danger to creativity Alan Moore says writing IS magic, evolved from paleolithic shamanism. Writer can and does change the world. You are your own most important instrument. which writing do I think is good? John Steinbeck’s East of Eden CS Lewis: Four Loves, Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, his speech about the rings Annie Dillard 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer Nassim Taleb Iain McGilchrist “The tongue is a fire” ...

how does information and thermal entropy relate? George Gilder Cesar Hidalgo Claude Shannon Boltzmann Kevin Kelly what is wrong with “spontaneous order”? WHat does it matter that the universe is increasing in entropy? Or our world is increasing in order? What are these people really talking about? Gilder mentions the need for stable channel for a surprising (high-entropy) signal Hidalgo I still think Taleb’s idea that we have different forms of government at different scales is important. My bodty has different degrees of freedom depending on context ion the overall structure (my knee has one degree of freedom which allows my ankle and hip to have way more) ...

Fear You will bring about the thing you fear. Some opponents of Donald Trump feared he would be an authoritarian dictator, censoring free speech and free press and the like. But some let this fear hold them so tightly they became today’s most extreme censors, and developed tendencies to shut down opposing views with force. Some supporters of white supremacy are so afraid of the gene pool being corrupted, thus barbaric behavior erupting amidst the “lower species” that they resort to barbaric murders in the name of cleansing the “barbaric genes”, becoming the very barbarians they fear. ...

reading list May 2025 Play Anything The Gift The End of certainty Beginning of Infinity Fabric of Reality How Information Grows Debt: The First 1,000 Years The History of Everything (Graeber) The Brothers Karamzov is Alyosha outside the economy? A good exemplar of gift giving? yes, he “has access to erotic forms of exchange that are neither exhausting nor exhaustible and whose use assures their plenty” Non-equilibrium (Prigogine) is also what a gift is. (no expectation of accounting for value such that there can be an equilibrium of exchange) ...

We should all grow up

Real fun is serious business

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/04/14/privacy.html privacy https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-know-what-you-really-want-and-be-free-from-mimetic-desire mimetic desire Facebook banned pseudonymous identities after all. Immediately unbridling the power of mimesis. what is good about transparency scientific progress I think our civilizational flourishing was unlocked when we provided proper incentives for people to share their discoveries of new theories and inventions. Patents, academic publishing of papers. TODO TK: is this true? did our industrial age explosion result from systems providing social credit to shared knowledge? Money is social credit (or can overlap with it at least) by the way. ...