Messages

you could paperclip them to posters

let people know how to get in on the madness

[Regarding advertising:]

sorry I've been absent from the project.. Recently I itemized the list of projects I'm working on and there were 13 items on it. So I've been kind of tied up. I'd say keep page 5, let's just build off it, but New Authors: try to keep that thread it kind of narrow. (x-link threads to create a PLOT-BRAID) That way we won't end up with more than 16 or so pages to write.

I think the plan is to "finish" this book (or maybe 90% of the possible endings), and then start a new one.


Regarding advertising:

Yes, begin inviting people. But hold off on submitting stuff to digg and stumbleupon and whatever... we should think about that separately.

We could use more graphic media. And video media.

Regarding the site itself:

Everyone look at the first few pages - do you think we're ready for people to come in? Do we need more explanation? more graphics? more jokes? how can we encourage people (each other included) to participate, rather than just read? Is it good now?

BUT WHAT IF THE PARTICIPANT WAS A GRRRRL?


seriously, I would have lost points if I didn't say "his or her" and "he or she"

[Taleb's top life tips]

“The only way you can say ‘Fuck you’ to fate is by saying it’s not going to affect how I live. So if somebody puts you to death, make sure you shave.” -Taleb

Here's an article I found on our boy Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4022091.ece?print=yes&randnum=1212675666154

It's a good insight into Taleb, and documents a few of his mannerisms and habits. Here are some good quotes:

Startlingly, this great sceptic, this non-guru who believes in nothing, is still a practising Christian. He regards with some contempt the militant atheism movement led by Richard Dawkins.

“Scientists don’t know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don’t believe it has any negative impact on people’s lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It’s like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it’s probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It’s an aesthetic thing.”

Take away religion, he says, and people start believing in nationalism, which has killed far more people. Religion is also a good way of handling uncertainty. It lowers blood pressure. He’s convinced that religious people take fewer financial risks.

This quote is pretty much directly from the Black Swan, and summarizes Taleb's opinion on eggheads.

For the non-mathematician, probability is an indecipherably complex field. But Taleb makes it easy by proving all the mathematics wrong. Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb’s creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. “You are either full of crap,” he says, “or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded.”

The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world.

The central point is that we have created a world we don’t understand. There’s a place he calls Mediocristan. This was where early humans lived. Most events happened within a narrow range of probabilities – within the bell-curve distribution still taught to statistics students. But we don’t live there any more. We live in Extremistan, where black swans proliferate, winners tend to take all and the rest get nothing – there’s Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and a lot of software writers living in a garage, there’s Domingo and a thousand opera singers working in Starbucks. Our systems are complex but over-efficient. They have no redundancy, so a black swan strikes everybody at once. The banking system is the worst of all.

“Complex systems don’t allow for slack and everybody protects that system. The banking system doesn’t have that slack. In a normal ecology, banks go bankrupt every day. But in a complex system there is a tendency to cluster around powerful units. Every bank becomes the same bank so they can all go bust together.”

Taleb on investing your money:

And you and me? Well, the good investment strategy is to put 90% of your money in the safest possible government securities and the remaining 10% in a large number of high-risk ventures. This insulates you from bad black swans and exposes you to the possibility of good ones. Your smallest investment could go “convex” – explode – and make you rich. High-tech companies are the best. The downside risk is low if you get in at the start and the upside very high. Banks are the worst – all the risk is downside. Don’t be tempted to play the stock market – “If people knew the risks they’d never invest.”

good quote on human nature:

“Let’s be human the way we are human. Homo sum – I am a man. Don’t accept any Olympian view of man and you will do better in society.”

and finally,

Taleb's top life tips

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

I'm conflicted on the gender pronoun issue.

My college professors instilled in my a cringe reaction whenever improper pronouns are used. They insisted that we write it out the full way every time:

"When the participant finished the test, he or she would put down his or her pencil and wait for the instructor."

It was cumbersome, and to get it to sound right, we had to engineer a lot of crazy sentences to avoid all the "his or her" hoopla. The professors strongly believed that using They or Their in those situations was innacurate (and would take points off). This isn't meant as an appeal to authority, but these people are very well educated on gender issues, so they're not shooting from ignorance.

This made it all the more complex to write on topics such as the intersexed or transgendered.


But aside from them, I've never heard much objection to using the plural to avoid improper usage. Its ubiquity is a sign that we are in the middle of linguistic evolution.

Something else that is important to know is that a switch to “gender-neutral” language must take place despite, not in accordance with, most people’s preference. Giving both a male and a generic meaning to a single word is the way people like to talk. Take, for instance, the relatively modern slang word “guy.” Although its use became ubiquitous after women had been “liberated,” a “guy” is a male person, but the phrase “you guys” includes females. And while “he” has been replaced by “they” in some cases (e.g. “One of the neighbors drove their car last night.”), it still persists in others (e.g. “A fool and his money are soon parted.”), and repeated attempts to create a common-gender replacement pronoun have been futile.

these things aren't necessarily logical. The above cited blogger (that entry is a good read, BTW) also posits:

...a transformation of English usage for solely ideological, not grammatical reasons is Orwellian. Let me explain. In his book 1984 George Orwell described a fictional totalitarian government that created a language called Newspeak in order to control the minds of its subjects. Newspeak was a modified form of English. It did not contain words like “liberty” or “independence,” and the ideas that pertained to freedom were obscured by equivocation and lack of proper vocabulary. What does this have to do with “gender-neutral” language? The modern movement against “sexist” language is the first widespread effort (that I am aware of) to change English usage habits for ideological purposes. Thought patterns, rather than speech patterns, are the target; and the momentum comes largely from a few large publishers, not from the general public (see how people like to use “sexist” language, above). Accomplishing the transformation will have one of two effects. If language can heavily influence thought, then a gender switch will bring the populace closer to feminism simply by reading their grammar books. But if (as many linguists hold) thought is independent of language, the whole shift is a charade and a colossal waste of time and effort. Either way, the general public loses.

I've really been enjoying this videos. Thanks for the post, Jason!

Good rant!

I love this line:

with 6 billion people alive, we should have about as many Great Artists / Scientists as there have been during the last several millenia, yet we don't, so I shall blame them for their own inaptitude at living up to my mathematically-backed expectations of them.

good post. And HI there, welcome to PD! We do love it when new people come in and aren't afraid to dive right into the Think For Yourself Shmuck material. I'd also like to reccommend the Operation: Mindfuck board, which is a great place for plans and projects and implimenting all this shit we talk about.


My one qualm with the dialogue you write would be this part:

We can’t predict you, if you do good I win and get to keep you all as my pets and you’ll be free-will-ing forever

Not bad. I like that Eris stands for free will. But why is Goodness the stick by which Free Will is measured?
Eris is a Goddess of discord and strife. Yes, the modern Discordians often depict her as benevolent - but I don't think Goodness is really in her plan. Human Nature is her plan, and it can be pretty brutal at times.



see, I just saw Dark Knight last night, and I'm still high off the dialogue where the Joker calls himself an Agent of Strife. And all the talk about Chaos in general. 

Hi rev! what are you working on these days?
How's the Discordian scene in brazil?

 

that one's useful in so many situations.

I really like this one:



the focal length gives you a good sense of the flower's depth. The ones of the bee are really cute, too. For a "crappy digital camera", not bad at all!

related link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax

there's so much wisdom packed into so few words

it's like a 21st century advice haiku

wow, that website is seriously from the web of yesteryear.

good enough that I read a big chunk of it and was like, "wait a minute, did he just post an actual health poster to spoof us?" then I saw the bit about cyclones. So I think it's believable.