Two perspectives

[...] my biggest problem with Frequentist stuff is it makes an objectionable assumption that repeatedly performing an experiment is mathematically equivalent from sampling from a random sequence.

This is equivalent to a strong statement about the Kolmogorov Complexity of data coming out of your experiment. The difference between “I don’t know better than p(x) what the next x value will be” and “the universe conspires so that in repeated sampling the long term frequency of X=x is p(x)” are two completely different views of the physics of the world. Only one of them is compatible with the known facts about the world. Sometimes the frequentist viewpoint is an acceptable substitute for the “physics” (or more generally mechanistic description of a process) but that’s an assumption that should in general be tested by collecting a large sample of things.

So if you’re planning to do Frequentist statistics because you have a plethora of thousands and thousands of data points collected in a stable experimental manner and these pass at least some basic tests for randomness… then I say more power to you. This is vastly less than 1% of most science. -- Daniel Lakeland [ref]

Help

It is the poor who gives alms to the poor -- Japanese proverb

Peace

Old empires, like the Arab or the Spanish, claimed they needed to conquer so to spread their true religion and save as many souls as possible. That was doublespeak for their wish for power. Power to satisfy an unlimited desire fueled by greed, a feeling of superiority, an infantile need to dominate. These stories were made to convince their people, to gather legions, and perhaps to convince themselves. Recent empires have the same needs, the same hunger. However the discourse changed. The British wanted to spread civilization, Soviets to promote communism, Americans to deliver freedom. But these pretensions, in the end, only preceded guns, theft, and death. The desolation of imperial peace.

Preferences

How could the same people who were used to wrestling with the ethics of eugenics and torture (issues you might have imagined were more clear-cut) think that all there was to say about professor-student sex was that it was fine if consensual? Many philosophers prefer to see complexity only where it suits them. -- On (Not) Sleeping With Your Students, Amia Srinivasan

Abductive Reasoning

Summaries are measures made to tame complexity. They quickly tell something about a system by condensing its manifold dimensions into a single number. Every summary compacts the information about the system like an hydraulic press. They are used to evaluate the system's progress, even considering all the potential problems that come from excessive simplification. But why do humans have the tendency of transform them into goals? This reification of summaries, results on Goodhart's law that says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. GDP (gross domestic product), for instance, is not just reified, but even deified. Policies are made, and societies suffer, to increase GDP. It does not matter if something is productive, or destructive, or parasitic, if the final result is the increase of overall GDP. It only knows sums, because subtractions are taboo. And everything not measurable in GDP terms, like ecological services, humans' well being, or social inequality, are seen as irrelevant zeros. Because someone said, long ago, that economies that progress had seen increases of GDP. Then, the superstitious flocks that rule economic schools, by a kind of abductive fallacy, flipped the idea to defend that because GDP grows, the economy progresses. And for that, as a sacrifice to this grotesque god, the world burns.

Context

A scientific theory always bends when faced with reality. But is the bent insufferable? And what options remain if we reject its distortions? We decide about theories not only on their merits, but also in our circumstances.

Target

Don't you see how useless it is to know the answer to the wrong question? -- Ursula K. Le Guin

Digestive System

We are creatures of meaning, we search it and find it and eat it, even when meaning is not there. It is hard to face the reality that there's no meaning outside our minds: the wandering galaxies that make the universe represent a limitless desolation. And our hunger is not easily satiated. It makes us consume randomness and chaos dressed as order, propaganda and lies as promises of plenty, bullshit as method. It is very hard to understand what to accept and what to reject. One road is trust. Trust the words of someone who does good in accordance to what she says (or said, it might be from a book of a long dead author), and use them as an anchor to trust more things. Be skeptical of parasitic meaning, which is legion, but be open to the those meanings that multiply in you. Be fruitful. A garden.

what is the proper limit to wealth?

People in our society give too much value to property, to having stuff. We have and long for too many things that tie us to debt, and work, and compromises with others. While in work, in a certain sense, we don't 'own our bodies' and must sometimes do things we don't agree or like which decreases your liberty. Seneca, in his second letter to Lucilius, said: "Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough." We just bloat what we mean by necessary, and consider a wise position to assume that it's never enough.

ICAR

Não falha. Quando pergunto aos meus  alunos (os que se consideram religiosos) se se vêem primeiro como  cristãos ou católicos, a resposta é sempre a mesma: católicos. O que não  surpreende se pensarmos no que diz Antero na sua célebre conferência Causas da Decadência dos Povos Peninsulares: "O cristianismo é sobretudo um sentimento. O catolicismo é sobretudo uma instituição".  Ora, se pensarmos no modo como os nossos jovens vivem  institucionalizados desde que nascem, a creche, o J.I., a escola, o ATL,  a catequese, as actividades desportivas, os campos de férias, o Inglês,  a música, as explicações, os escuteiros, parece-me haver razão  suficiente para o facto de sentirem mais o peso de uma instituição do  que o de uma verdadeira religião. Tal como com o ISLA, o ISPA ou IST, o I  de igreja poderia ser de Instituto, passando assim a chamar-me  Instituto Católico Apostólico Romano. Fica naturalmente de fora o  pertinentíssimo O que bem poderia acrescentar-se no final para sugerir  como, ao contrário das verdadeiramente cristãs, falta às asas católicas  robustez para levarem as almas até ao Reino do Céus. -- José Ricardo Costa ref

All revolutions were illegal

Constitutions can’t create or destroy natural rights like self-determination. They exist only to protect such rights. Denying such right by constitutional or non-constitutional means ferments a tyranny. [...] It’s nice if constitutions make reasonable provision for secession votes but it’s not required. The natural right of self determination exists regardless of what constitutions say. -- Tyler Cowen

a sort of moral precept

I do have a sort of moral precept that I’ll stand behind, which is that you should not unilaterally reduce another person’s choices. -- Marcus J. Ranum

Answering the Fermi Paradox

Our civilization is making Earth a space-ship, by destroying ecological services and then trying to replace them with new industries and technologies. I cannot think of a more impactful stupid behavior.

Local

Some philosophies are like local shops for local people.

The food of reason

In order to reason, arguments are not enough. Without evidence, reasoning is like a blind person trying to walk straight in a desert.

Exposure

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- HL Menken

Fail-safe

The rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails - and usually not even then. -- David Hull

Cost-effective

Mutually costly-signaled reality is reality we can rely on. -- Sister Y ‏@TheViewFromHell

Truth

It is hard for a falsehood to be consistent. As time goes by, more inconsistencies accrue. The matter is worse if lies interact with each other. Sooner or later something must give.  If that didn't happen, truth wouldn't be important.

Expectations

Ethics is a symptom of the economic progress that came from the extraction of cheap energy. This progress, and the wealth it provided, allowed society to accept the costs of harm reduction and the social securities that we are used today. Perhaps there's some inertia about the current mores that will resist  some change, but the tap of cheap energy is closing. Don't expect much about the ones with power.

Tricks

The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want. -- Bram Cohen

Eating the World is not Enough

People assume that capitalism is a system defined by markets and trade. But these pre-existed capitalism by thousands of years. What distinguishes capitalism is that it is organized around perpetual expansion and accumulation, which is euphemistically referred to as "growth". This requires:

• enclosure to generate proletarianization
• artificial scarcity to generate competitive productivity
• an extractive relationship with nature and labour to enable surplus accumulation
• "frontiers" where nature and labour can be cheapened and costs externalized

Such a system is incompatible with ecology, and  incompatible with any vision for a world that's free of poverty, exploitation and structural inequality.  We need to have an open conversation about whether such a system is actually worth clinging to in the 21st century. -- Jason Hickel

Free-will as a necessity II

Holding people responsible is not a fact-finding process, its a normative process. -- Peter McKnight

what you are told

Morality is doing what is right, regardless of what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told,  regardless of what is right. -- Anon.

Free-will as a necessity

Behavior is always going to be more important to the law than neuroscience. -- Peter McKnight

Scaling

Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better. -- S. T. Rev

Stubborness

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. -- John Adams

what you do, not what you say

The purpose of the system is what it does.  After all, there is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. -- Anthony Stafford Beer

X

The Buddha rejected all questions of the type ‘Does X exist?’ He rephrased it: ‘Can we experience X?' -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Redistribution

The tax debate is 99% about distribution, 1% about growth. Don’t let economists fool you with their models that they don’t even pretend capture real phenomena. When they say lower corporate taxes increase growth they are modelling a world without assets where all profits are devoted to new investments in capital equipment. [...] Redistribution of global wealth is clearly the most obvious policy for a utilitarian. -- Cameron K. Murray