Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • A Question About the Cortex

    A QUESTION ABOUT THE CORTEX

    —“Does the commensurability of the edge of the cerebral cortex require fractal geometry, like a coastline? Does it have self similarity?”—The Nationalist @Nationalist7346

    No.

    1. the outer layer of the cortex is just a couple of mm thick; consists two functions (what,where), using six layers; divided into columns and modules (groups of columns); homogenous in structure but differing in neural density by physical origin of nerves that enter them.

    2. So no it’s not fractal: the average size of a human cortex, if laid out flat would be approximately the size of a dinner napkin, and just as thick. The rest of the neocortex consists entirely of white matter (nerve fibers: axons) which connect everything to everything.

    3. With the hippocampus consolidating and organizing information, and then using rehearsal (replay) to encode episodes of memory, and thalamus controlling attention (what gets thru to the neocortex for computation, and basal ganglia that surrounds both releasing physical actions.

    4. Most of the advanced functions of the brain consist of these three ‘levers’ and the natural increase in reflection created by increasing brain size, from back (senses) to front (permuting, planning, manipulating). So the brain functions as a series of loops (operating system)

    5. That recursively process a moment of information and merge it with the next moment of information in a continuous stream which we can ‘buffer’ with a half life of just a few seconds, and no more than twenty or so. By Comparison of these moments we discern change in state.

    6. When people say the brain isn’t a computer they’re only a tiny bit right. It does operate in binary (on off) and frequency (hertz), and by competition for attention but with unimaginable numbers of connections in unimaginable parallel, in a continuous loop (OS).

  • Terminal Velocity of a Cat vs Mouse?

    Terminal Velocity of a Cat vs Mouse? https://t.co/Tc0jSXg7s4

  • Terminal Velocity of a Cat vs Mouse?

    Terminal Velocity of a Cat vs Mouse? https://propertarianism.com/2020/06/02/terminal-velocity-of-a-cat-vs-mouse/

    Source date (UTC): 2020-06-02 00:42:44 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1267617611153657858

  • Terminal Velocity of a Cat vs Mouse?

    QUESTION: One question. What is the difference between the terminal velocity of a cat, and a mouse? ANSWER: A man’s terminal velocity is 210 km/h (130 mph). A cat’s terminal velocity is 100 km/h (60 mph) A mouse’s terminal velocity is ~10km/h (6 mph) OLD STUFF: “Down 1000 foot mine shaft, a mouse walks away (not true), a rat dies (certainly), a man breaks (certainly, very), and a horse splashes.”

  • Terminal Velocity of a Cat vs Mouse?

    QUESTION: One question. What is the difference between the terminal velocity of a cat, and a mouse? ANSWER: A man’s terminal velocity is 210 km/h (130 mph). A cat’s terminal velocity is 100 km/h (60 mph) A mouse’s terminal velocity is ~10km/h (6 mph) OLD STUFF: “Down 1000 foot mine shaft, a mouse walks away (not true), a rat dies (certainly), a man breaks (certainly, very), and a horse splashes.”

  • (Religion is the most difficult problem in social science. Now that I understand

    (Religion is the most difficult problem in social science. Now that I understand it, the problem is knowing what to do about it. And while I now what to do. The existing fundamentalist population is … a challenge.)

    Reply addressees: @pocalypsehustle

  • Taleb as Scam Artist Undermining Western Civilization

    TALEB AS SCAM ARTIST UNDERMINING WESTERN CIVILIZATION (tough talk from twitter) (read at your own risk)

    —“Taleb, like Gould, is trying to demonise mainstream psychology–but he’s only successful in creating a folk demon for the lay public. He knows that anyone with any technical expertise thinks he’s a clown. But he doesn’t care, because accuracy is less important to him than fame.”—Claire Lehmann @clairlemon

    I don’t want to be the front man on this subject but he’s not trying to take down psychology, he’s trying to justify arab immigration to the west, and satisfy the chip on his shoulder as a christian arab. His empirical work was a dead end, and he can’t tolerate the truth: Trust. West and east used tests successfully to filter out corruption for positions in government. Same for military, then same for academy. Wealth is available across the bell curve, with complexity (IQ) determining your market. You need conscientiousness to accumulate that wealth. What taleb is attempting to obscure is west can create large complex organizations because of trust and trust under rule of law, and rule of law by filtering out corruption granting privilege to IQ. He can’t face that because levantines cannot create trust, rule of law or … … large complex organizations, because they thing lying is a tool, cunning is of merit, outwitting by cunning superior than outwitting by increase in productivity, quality, or innovation, and that the commons is to be pilfered rather than invested in at every opportunity. So taleb is missing the whole point: that he is only able to use his techniques of via-negativa risk invstment, becuase he is in the only high trust polity, using IMMORAL MEANS OF GAIN, and so is his alter ego “Fat Tony”. These men are, by western ethics and morality ‘Scammers”. Yet Taleb’s entire literature is devoted to lionizing scamming while ridiculing those who hold positions of privilege (influence) precisely because they are not in the scamming business. Now, this analysis will expose the primary difference between middle eastern and western… … people and it will explain why certain groups profit in certain industries: because they are immoral, and westerners are not.Morality requires reciprocity: productive, fully informed,warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of imposition of costs by externality against interests. It is quite profitable to engage in immorality among moral people, just as it is less so among immoral people. And the finance business is by and large unproductive. In other words a westerner would never engage in the tactic used by Georg Soros, which was extractive. He did. So whether you cast these people as amoral or immoral, intentional or unintentional, or genetically or culturally different,the reality is that only westerners practice material Reciprocity and verbal reciprocity Truth,and because we do we produce high trust and large complex … … disproportionately productive organizations from the family to the enterprise to the state. And lower trust people that do NOT sort for trust and grant privilege to people who have ability in complexity to PRESERVE that TRUST. That is what the chinese and the west did. What institutions did the middle east foster instead? Cunning, Cheating, Lying, Rent seeking, taxing trade routes rather than producing. They lauded inbreeding, familiasm, tribalism, and not trust and productivity – and they rewarded dogmatists not talent. As such they could not produce a middle class, middle class majority population, and middle class ethics, and as such they could not push trustworthiness down into the middle, working, and lower classes. Which is why they remained poor despite taxing world trade and … … consuming the genetic, cultural, institutional, knowledge and aesthetic capital of five great civilizations and reducing them to ignorance, poverty and dysgenia. So yes you can make money if your conscientious at every point in the IQ curve … … but you cannot push trust, reciprocity, truth, and duty, judge and jury, contract and rule of law, down into a population and produce the multiples of scale, unless you FILTER upward for both intelligence (complexity) and conscientiousness, and you reward the combination … … with status and income, forcing a status hierarchy that must be imitated. And that’s before we get to the fact that smarter people are better at suppressing error – which strangely, Taleb, as another proponent of via-negativa seems to overlook. And that as we scale … … opportunities are not scarcer, but more plentiful, but so are the increasing cascades of error. So you know, basically, Taleb has been trying to teach the west how to devolve into a low trust bunch of middle eastern scam artists and calling it ‘smart’. … Meanwhile, he fails to grasp that those ‘educated but unintelligent people’ are in their position to eliminate error and low trust, not to maximize profits. Which if you have been following along this argument I’m making, means that not maximizing personal profit maximizes ALL. So let me reduce Taleb’s life’s work as an essayist in ridicule of western civilization to its foundations: (a) Mandelbrot was right that the stock market is just noise so w/o inside information just invest in funds. … (and here comes the big one) … …. (b) rule of law and involuntary warranty must be extended from commercial goods and services to all information in the marketplace. yes that’s right. We gave license to people to not warranty their words in the 20th, and that’s the reason we are where we are today. Period. Did you make that leap with me? Well, then follow me. Taleb is a Charlatan who at first glance popularized Mandelbrot’s insights through humorous ego-inspiring essays making us feel smart like it made him feel smart. But the reality is, we have been smart for 5000 years: … … warranty of one’s words, martial testimony “reporting” in all walks of life. The RETURNS ON COMMONS make Private returns possible, and commons require high trust and that’s why europeans are the only people to have produced them. We call it the civil society.

  • Taleb as Scam Artist Undermining Western Civilization

    TALEB AS SCAM ARTIST UNDERMINING WESTERN CIVILIZATION (tough talk from twitter) (read at your own risk)

    —“Taleb, like Gould, is trying to demonise mainstream psychology–but he’s only successful in creating a folk demon for the lay public. He knows that anyone with any technical expertise thinks he’s a clown. But he doesn’t care, because accuracy is less important to him than fame.”—Claire Lehmann @clairlemon

    I don’t want to be the front man on this subject but he’s not trying to take down psychology, he’s trying to justify arab immigration to the west, and satisfy the chip on his shoulder as a christian arab. His empirical work was a dead end, and he can’t tolerate the truth: Trust. West and east used tests successfully to filter out corruption for positions in government. Same for military, then same for academy. Wealth is available across the bell curve, with complexity (IQ) determining your market. You need conscientiousness to accumulate that wealth. What taleb is attempting to obscure is west can create large complex organizations because of trust and trust under rule of law, and rule of law by filtering out corruption granting privilege to IQ. He can’t face that because levantines cannot create trust, rule of law or … … large complex organizations, because they thing lying is a tool, cunning is of merit, outwitting by cunning superior than outwitting by increase in productivity, quality, or innovation, and that the commons is to be pilfered rather than invested in at every opportunity. So taleb is missing the whole point: that he is only able to use his techniques of via-negativa risk invstment, becuase he is in the only high trust polity, using IMMORAL MEANS OF GAIN, and so is his alter ego “Fat Tony”. These men are, by western ethics and morality ‘Scammers”. Yet Taleb’s entire literature is devoted to lionizing scamming while ridiculing those who hold positions of privilege (influence) precisely because they are not in the scamming business. Now, this analysis will expose the primary difference between middle eastern and western… … people and it will explain why certain groups profit in certain industries: because they are immoral, and westerners are not.Morality requires reciprocity: productive, fully informed,warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of imposition of costs by externality against interests. It is quite profitable to engage in immorality among moral people, just as it is less so among immoral people. And the finance business is by and large unproductive. In other words a westerner would never engage in the tactic used by Georg Soros, which was extractive. He did. So whether you cast these people as amoral or immoral, intentional or unintentional, or genetically or culturally different,the reality is that only westerners practice material Reciprocity and verbal reciprocity Truth,and because we do we produce high trust and large complex … … disproportionately productive organizations from the family to the enterprise to the state. And lower trust people that do NOT sort for trust and grant privilege to people who have ability in complexity to PRESERVE that TRUST. That is what the chinese and the west did. What institutions did the middle east foster instead? Cunning, Cheating, Lying, Rent seeking, taxing trade routes rather than producing. They lauded inbreeding, familiasm, tribalism, and not trust and productivity – and they rewarded dogmatists not talent. As such they could not produce a middle class, middle class majority population, and middle class ethics, and as such they could not push trustworthiness down into the middle, working, and lower classes. Which is why they remained poor despite taxing world trade and … … consuming the genetic, cultural, institutional, knowledge and aesthetic capital of five great civilizations and reducing them to ignorance, poverty and dysgenia. So yes you can make money if your conscientious at every point in the IQ curve … … but you cannot push trust, reciprocity, truth, and duty, judge and jury, contract and rule of law, down into a population and produce the multiples of scale, unless you FILTER upward for both intelligence (complexity) and conscientiousness, and you reward the combination … … with status and income, forcing a status hierarchy that must be imitated. And that’s before we get to the fact that smarter people are better at suppressing error – which strangely, Taleb, as another proponent of via-negativa seems to overlook. And that as we scale … … opportunities are not scarcer, but more plentiful, but so are the increasing cascades of error. So you know, basically, Taleb has been trying to teach the west how to devolve into a low trust bunch of middle eastern scam artists and calling it ‘smart’. … Meanwhile, he fails to grasp that those ‘educated but unintelligent people’ are in their position to eliminate error and low trust, not to maximize profits. Which if you have been following along this argument I’m making, means that not maximizing personal profit maximizes ALL. So let me reduce Taleb’s life’s work as an essayist in ridicule of western civilization to its foundations: (a) Mandelbrot was right that the stock market is just noise so w/o inside information just invest in funds. … (and here comes the big one) … …. (b) rule of law and involuntary warranty must be extended from commercial goods and services to all information in the marketplace. yes that’s right. We gave license to people to not warranty their words in the 20th, and that’s the reason we are where we are today. Period. Did you make that leap with me? Well, then follow me. Taleb is a Charlatan who at first glance popularized Mandelbrot’s insights through humorous ego-inspiring essays making us feel smart like it made him feel smart. But the reality is, we have been smart for 5000 years: … … warranty of one’s words, martial testimony “reporting” in all walks of life. The RETURNS ON COMMONS make Private returns possible, and commons require high trust and that’s why europeans are the only people to have produced them. We call it the civil society.

  • Comments on Nate Silver’s Book

    Doolittle’s Comments On Silver’s Quotes from his Book:

    1. The story data tells us is often the one we’d like to hear, and we usually make sure it has a happy ending.

    2. There are entire disciplines in which predictions have been failing, often at a great cost to society.

    3. Some stone-age strengths have become information-age weaknesses.

    4. We can never make perfectly objective predictions. They will always be tainted by our subjective point of view.
      (CD: They will always be tainted by our wants for the world rather than untainted by a description of the world. we live in paradigms of utility.)

    5. A belief in the objective truth -and a commitment to pursuing it- is the first prerequisite of making better predictions.
      (CD: very few of us seek truth. We all seek utility not truth. For some of us truth and utility are identical. for others it forces them into competition with darwin – and truth is the enemy of false genes as much as false ideas.)

    6. Prediction is important because it connects subjective and objective reality.
      (CD: prediction is important because it falsifies many subjective realities training us to predict objective realities.)

    7. We are undoubtedly living with many delusions that we do not even realize.
      (CD: psychology must be the study of cognitive error, bias, wishful thinking and deceit – and the sciences efforts at compensating for them.)

    8. We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

    9. We must think more carefully about the assumptions and beliefs that we bring to a problem.
    10. A certain amount of immersion in a topic will provide disproportionally more insight that an executive summary.
    11. The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.
    12. Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.
    13. If you have reason to think that yesterday’s forecast was wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

    14. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.

    15. Extrapolation is a very basic method of prediction -usually, much too basic.
      (CD: One must never extrapolate a trend – everything in nature equilibrates.)

    16. In many cases involving predictions about human activity, the very act of prediction can alter the way that people behave.

    17. The most effective flu prediction might be the one that fails to come to fruition because it motivates people toward more healthful choices.

    18. While simplicity can be a virtue for a model, a model should at least be sophisticatedly simple.
      (CD: the quality of a prediction is dependent upon the quality and quantity of information, not the complexity of the model.)

    19. We can never achieve perfect objectivity, rationality, or accuracy in our beliefs. Instead, we can strive to be less subjective, less irrational, and less wrong.
      (CD: we have spent, because of theology, far too much of our history in via-positiva justification, and are still escaping it. Instead we must focus on via positiva reduction of ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, and deceit.)

    20. Recently, […] some well-respected statisticians have begun to argue that frequentist statistics should no longer be taught to undergraduates. […] In fact, if what you read what’s been written in the past ten years, it’s hard to find anything that doesn’t advocate a Bayesian approach.
      (CD: Bayseian accounting is superior to mathematical averages. when stated in this manner the difference in quality of prediction is rather obvious.)

    21. There is strong empirical evidence that there is a benefit in aggregating different forecasts.
      (CD: competition between theories produces information not only about one theory but about the minds of man making those theories.)

    22. This is another of those Information-age risks: we share so much information that our independence is reduced. (CD: information that is not true (parsimonious)

    23. Perhaps the central finding of behavioral economics is that most of us are overconfident when we make predictions.
      (CD: we evolved overconfidence because action for gain is necessary. We confuse the necessity of action for gain with applying it beyond its evolutionary purpose.)

    24. In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes’ theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.
      (CD: Whether mathematical Bayes or Philosophical Popper, or Cognitive science’s lesson that our brains operate by massively parallel similarly bayesian means, learning through trial and error no matter how error prone, will produce either progress in knowledge or failure to survive.)

    25. The March toward scientific progress is not always straightforward, and some well-regarded (even “consensus”) theories are later proved wrong- but either way science tends to move toward the truth.
      (CD: The difference between the fundamental sciences and entrepreneurship, and daily action is that fundamental science is a luxury good, the findings of which may propagate through the polity over time – but daily action in life has no such luxury of time and cost – we must produce returns. This conflict illustrates the problem of our evolutionary demand for action influencing our overconfidence in science, and conversely, our science ignoring time and cost. )

    26. Under Bayes’ theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.
      (CD: I knew bayes first, Godel second, hayek third, popper fourt, and kuhn fifth. Bayes provides accounting on one end, then popper, then kuhn, and then hayek on the other end. Only during the past twenty years have we understood the brain’s mixture of elementary composition and spatial attribution. Same process, different scales. It’s not just bayesian – it’s the only possible epistemological method and everything else is a legacy failure we call ‘justificationism’.)

  • Comments on Nate Silver’s Book

    Doolittle’s Comments On Silver’s Quotes from his Book:

    1. The story data tells us is often the one we’d like to hear, and we usually make sure it has a happy ending.

    2. There are entire disciplines in which predictions have been failing, often at a great cost to society.

    3. Some stone-age strengths have become information-age weaknesses.

    4. We can never make perfectly objective predictions. They will always be tainted by our subjective point of view.
      (CD: They will always be tainted by our wants for the world rather than untainted by a description of the world. we live in paradigms of utility.)

    5. A belief in the objective truth -and a commitment to pursuing it- is the first prerequisite of making better predictions.
      (CD: very few of us seek truth. We all seek utility not truth. For some of us truth and utility are identical. for others it forces them into competition with darwin – and truth is the enemy of false genes as much as false ideas.)

    6. Prediction is important because it connects subjective and objective reality.
      (CD: prediction is important because it falsifies many subjective realities training us to predict objective realities.)

    7. We are undoubtedly living with many delusions that we do not even realize.
      (CD: psychology must be the study of cognitive error, bias, wishful thinking and deceit – and the sciences efforts at compensating for them.)

    8. We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

    9. We must think more carefully about the assumptions and beliefs that we bring to a problem.
    10. A certain amount of immersion in a topic will provide disproportionally more insight that an executive summary.
    11. The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.
    12. Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.
    13. If you have reason to think that yesterday’s forecast was wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

    14. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.

    15. Extrapolation is a very basic method of prediction -usually, much too basic.
      (CD: One must never extrapolate a trend – everything in nature equilibrates.)

    16. In many cases involving predictions about human activity, the very act of prediction can alter the way that people behave.

    17. The most effective flu prediction might be the one that fails to come to fruition because it motivates people toward more healthful choices.

    18. While simplicity can be a virtue for a model, a model should at least be sophisticatedly simple.
      (CD: the quality of a prediction is dependent upon the quality and quantity of information, not the complexity of the model.)

    19. We can never achieve perfect objectivity, rationality, or accuracy in our beliefs. Instead, we can strive to be less subjective, less irrational, and less wrong.
      (CD: we have spent, because of theology, far too much of our history in via-positiva justification, and are still escaping it. Instead we must focus on via positiva reduction of ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, and deceit.)

    20. Recently, […] some well-respected statisticians have begun to argue that frequentist statistics should no longer be taught to undergraduates. […] In fact, if what you read what’s been written in the past ten years, it’s hard to find anything that doesn’t advocate a Bayesian approach.
      (CD: Bayseian accounting is superior to mathematical averages. when stated in this manner the difference in quality of prediction is rather obvious.)

    21. There is strong empirical evidence that there is a benefit in aggregating different forecasts.
      (CD: competition between theories produces information not only about one theory but about the minds of man making those theories.)

    22. This is another of those Information-age risks: we share so much information that our independence is reduced. (CD: information that is not true (parsimonious)

    23. Perhaps the central finding of behavioral economics is that most of us are overconfident when we make predictions.
      (CD: we evolved overconfidence because action for gain is necessary. We confuse the necessity of action for gain with applying it beyond its evolutionary purpose.)

    24. In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes’ theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.
      (CD: Whether mathematical Bayes or Philosophical Popper, or Cognitive science’s lesson that our brains operate by massively parallel similarly bayesian means, learning through trial and error no matter how error prone, will produce either progress in knowledge or failure to survive.)

    25. The March toward scientific progress is not always straightforward, and some well-regarded (even “consensus”) theories are later proved wrong- but either way science tends to move toward the truth.
      (CD: The difference between the fundamental sciences and entrepreneurship, and daily action is that fundamental science is a luxury good, the findings of which may propagate through the polity over time – but daily action in life has no such luxury of time and cost – we must produce returns. This conflict illustrates the problem of our evolutionary demand for action influencing our overconfidence in science, and conversely, our science ignoring time and cost. )

    26. Under Bayes’ theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.
      (CD: I knew bayes first, Godel second, hayek third, popper fourt, and kuhn fifth. Bayes provides accounting on one end, then popper, then kuhn, and then hayek on the other end. Only during the past twenty years have we understood the brain’s mixture of elementary composition and spatial attribution. Same process, different scales. It’s not just bayesian – it’s the only possible epistemological method and everything else is a legacy failure we call ‘justificationism’.)