Irrationality is not necessarily bad

I'm slowly working through finishing The Waking Dream, which was assigned in a college class and I read maybe 70% of back then. The thing about it all that sticks with me is the idea of how differently our ancestors used to think about the world, and how remnants of that mode of thought in fact still are common today.

Rationality in the epistemic sense is about seeing the world as clear as you can, mathematically, given what you've seen of the world. This doesn't mean perfection. Rationality is about observing one white swan, then two white swans, then three, and therefore surmising that there could be more swans. And if there are more swans, you should expect the next one's color to be white, with odds of 80% (under Laplace's Rule, $$\frac{s+1}{n+2}$$) against not-white. A hundred white swans seen, you can expect the next to be white at 99%. This doesn't mean the next one won't be black!

Suppose you did make this into a bet, with two people and yourself as the intermediary. One of them only reasons rationally, the other one reasons in their own irrational way. Both have only seen 100 swans. The rationalist bets $99 that the next swan you bring out is white, the irrationalist bets $1 that it is black, not merely non-white. The rationalist should be pretty happy -- there's a 1% chance the next could be any other color besides white, thus there's even less than 1% chance that it's any specific color! Why is the irrationalist taking this poor bet? They claim because they saw a frog devour 10 flies that morning and that is a symbol that black is coming.

See Full Post and Comments

HTTPS At Last

Finally got off my butt and used Let's Encrypt to add an HTTPS cert to this domain. Woot!

Non-HTTPS links should redirect to HTTPS ones, but this may change in the future if for some odd reason I think it should.

See Full Post and Comments

No longer bored of color

With thanks to Vox Day's theme that I shamelessly cribbed colors from.

The diff wasn't very much, the power of CSS. Only had to add a bit of new markup.

Still a bug with the first comment and last comment on a page with comments. They should have rounded borders. I thought first-child and last-child would work but it wasn't working, so maybe some other time I'll figure it out. Dumb with first-child/first-of-type. Anyway, PHP hack to the rescue.

See Full Post and Comments

Syria doesn't matter, but chemical warfare does

Suppose this whole drama in the news is a fabrication. Or at least that the use of chemical weapons is a fabrication. If so, then none of it really matters, Syria will still be in more or less the same state as it was a month ago. Even if Trump doesn't uncover the fabrication, it seems unlikely he would authorize a troops-on-ground war with the Syrian government. Tensions with Russia would increase, probably, but I also think war with Russia is unlikely at the moment. (If I'm wrong, I'll likely be dead, so nyah.)

Suppose the chemical attacks were ordered by Assad. This doesn't mean Assad must go, but the rest of the world (not just the US) must respond. Chemical warfare cannot be allowed to escalate.

Suppose the attacks were ordered by US state department employees, or Turkey, or some other government. This doesn't mean those employees or countries must go, but the rest of the world (not just the US) must, again, respond. Why not in the same manner?

See Full Post and Comments

Ghost in the Shell 2017 meets expectations

But I like to think my expectations were well-calibrated. So while I neither liked nor disliked the movie, it satisfied me.

I overheard someone leaving the theater they didn't like it. Too much focus on personal relations and nothing on philosophy. True, but why was anyone expecting a Hollywood flick to go full-GitS philosophy on its audience? Similarly I know some people were expecting Tachikomas, but did they ever see the first movie? Tachikoma-free. As was this one, so they'll be disappointed, due to their expectations.

Scarlett Johansson was a ridiculous casting for the Major. It's most prominent when she's paired up with Motoko's mother, an actual Japanese woman. But I'm also just kind of sick of her in things which is my main complaint about her. Still the actress not being Japanese is a valid criticism. While one might say the Major is a cyborg and it doesn't matter what she looks like on the outside (indeed she's had multiple designs in the animes), you're ignoring the anti-Western themes of the original material. Anyway my dislike of the lead is something I accounted for going in.

See Full Post and Comments