Author: the philosopher king

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.

miguel is a shitty liar. he says he works at the club but he didn’t mean he worked there as a whore. he’s always been a whore and a liar. so if he wasn’t there for pleasure, and he says he works there, and i saw him taking dicks, i guess he must be a whore. he’s definitely a liar because he said two weeks ago it wasn’t his scene. but yet he was there and taking dicks and being a whore.

odesza- line of sight. don’t misunderstand. the idiom “i don’t feel” can be easily misunderstood. i don’t mean the expanded expression “i am experiencing something different right now.” i am using the idiom expanded into the expression, “i experience all emotions in a completely different manner compared  to you and your life and the life of most other humans on the planet.” can i explain? i doubt it.

when did the word utopia shift into the role of derogatory term against liberals? utopia was invented by thomas moore as an allegory for heaven on earth where people of all faiths (specifically being limited to protestants and catholics) could get along in peace and harmony. get a grip, whackos! thomas moore didn’t live so long ago and besides … all his writings and most of the relevant contemporary and subsequent commentaries are still extant. i can’t wait for our robot overlords and their “conception” of meaning. i mean, i can’t wait for them to order the human slavemasters to put me in an oven. i mean, i cannot wait because i will die if i wait because they will kill me and then i will be dead.

i am reminded of peter gabriel’s song “big time.” i am molting and shedding my skin. i do this. it’s my nature. not only have i become fully aware of it, i like it. i have built some coping strategies that may not exactly mesh with my new lifelong strategies. therefore, i’m designing new coping strategies based on a combination of well-tested theory and empirical evidence. the context for my use of the word “theory” here should be clear, but in case it’s not, i’m very specifically referring to theory in the context of the scientific method. i would like to report on the results in a future post or a series of future posts. may it be!