Month: May 2018

here’s why negativity matters. i live a fact-based life and use fantasy as an effective tool for what it’s good for: stress relief, entertainment and imagination. i do not believe in magic! i deploy effective strategies in my life to attain my goals. i do fail in many regards. how can i become the best version of myself if i don’t see the negative and attempt to overcome it? i don’t believe that white-washing negativity and misery leads to more effective thinking. i believe it puts my consciousness in a black box.

if i’ve already learned something, i tend to skip over the boring parts in review. when i’m attempting to learn new things, i tend to skip over the parts i already know. this is inefficient and reduces my effectiveness because of associativity priming. it’s more difficult to create a stable, recallable mental context and to place knowledge in its proper context if i skip over the boring parts.

i am a knowledge-seeker. i consider this a positive character attribute. sometimes the truth hurts, but mostly it helps. as i get older and wiser, i am also learning methodologies to effectively deploy knowledge. thus i consider the sort of knowledge-seeking that i carry out to be exponential. in other words, the sum of effectiveness (over time) is much, much greater than the initial investment.

ouch. i just learned the name and for concepts that i’ve been struggling with for years. thank you, richard thaler. wow. consider me educated!

like weather, the behavior or any given individual human is only predictable within a short range of time and with little degree of accuracy. however, like climate, the behavior of a group of humans is highly predictable over extremely long periods of time. applying the long-term prediction to any individual human is tricky. an expected behavior is probably going to occur at some point, but the tricky part is determining when. how did i know richard was going to betray me and how did i know that brian’s betrayal was going to cut more deeply? they are humans and every human i’ve met or read about betrays every other human eventually. that part is inevitable. i never trusted richard as much because he insisted on less trust and more protocol. brian insisted on trust and flaunted protocol. therefore, richard had less trust to lose compared to brian. brian was the higher risk. luckily, i kept my distance from both of them although i let brian in more than i should have. he’s going to have a harder time coping with the fact that i’ve shut the door to him regarding my personal life and he will predictably lash out. i never wanted his friendship and i still don’t want it. he followed izzy’s pattern to the letter. i suppose brian’s next move is to try to “reconcile” which is code for manipulate and dominate. it’s very simple: my answer is no.

how do we stop bias feedback loops in all data, especially profiling data that exacerbates institutionalized racism?wow! what a question. the background is that palantir is being used to work up profiles of criminals based on criminal data. then it catches the same criminals it caught before and gives them even worse scores. people who live on the fringes of society get swept up into feedback loops. get caught once doing something criminal and they have a higher chance of being scoped out and pinpointed. anybody see the problem here? right. if you don’t get caught, you won’t get profiled. if you don’t get caught because you live under a system of white privilege, you definitely won’t get profiled. because you’re white. proposed solution? the scientific method. take a baseline and use a well thought placebo to test the null hypothesis. don’t just profile criminals. profile randoms! profile judges. profile politicians. profile old, rich, white men. it’s not perfect but it’ll engage at least a tiny bit of science against the deafeningly loud screech of racist feedback loops.

evolution gave us a biological, physiological and psychological pathway that to some degree defines all of our behaviors. however, evolution gave us one clear advantage over most other species on the planet and that is the ability to adapt not just biologically but intellectually. even if you argued that the smartest animals on the planet have some intellectual adaptability, the intensity is orders of magnitude between them and us. but by their very natures, our biology and our intellect are in conflict. so we have a choice: biology, intellect, or some degree of blend between the two. i’ve been down all three paths and i’ve found that i have i prefer a blend. furthermore, i have found that a fact-based intellect is far more powerful and rewarding compared to a black-box-based intellect, by orders of magnitude. this is not simply my experience. i have read hundreds of books in my lifetime that have all corroborated the same thing. the more fact-based intellect a human has — on average — is directly correlated to a number of positive achievements in “survival of the fittest.” in short, by restraining my biology and intellect, i can control them. control gives me an advantage. my advantages give me more resources and the ability to act on opportunities to gather more resources. more resources lead to more opportunities to protect myself and survive longer. the game of life is survival. that’s the foundation of my self restraint.

we live in a world of celebretards. they are interesting mostly because they are train wrecks. i, conversely, am not a train wreck and there is nothing particularly interesting about me. “it’s a little bit drizzly and cloudy and cool here. i might go for a long walk and listen to my book on financial markets.” when i say things like this to people, they immediately focus on the weather — literally, small talk. i’m becoming a subject matter expert on numerical and financial maths? yawn. oh, well. in the end, it doesn’t really bother me because i get to stay in the shadows and amass health, wealth and compound interest while the rest of the world wastes time on the …. kardashians. ugh.