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I suspect there's a Pons Asinorum of probability between the bettor who thinks that you make money on horse races by betting on the horse you think will win, and the bettor who realizes that you can only make money on horse races if you find horses whose odds seem poorly calibrated relative to s...

"Even though he could foresee the problem then, we can see it equally well now.  Therefore, if he could foresee the solution then, we should be able to see it now.  After all, Seldon was not a magician.  There are no trick methods of escaping a dilemma that he can see and we c...

It seems that back when the Prisoner's Dilemma was still being worked out, Merrill Flood and Melvin Drescher tried a 100-fold iterative PD on two smart but unprepared subjects, Armen Alchian of UCLA and John D. Williams of RAND. The kicker being that the payoff matrix was asymmetrical, with dual...

"Believing this statement will make you happier."        -- Ryan Lortie "Make changes based on your strongest opportunities, not your most convenient ones."        -- MegaTokyo "The mind is a...

Followup to:  Pretending to be Wise For comparison purposes, here's an essay with similar content to yesterday's "Pretending to be Wise", which I wrote in 2006 in a completely different style, edited down slightly (content has been deleted but not added).  Note that the...

Followup to:  Against Maturity "The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral."        -- Dante Alighieri, famous hell expert A special case of adulthood-signaling worth singling out, is the display of neutral...

Saith Robin in "Seeking a Cynic's Library": Cynicism and Idealism are a classic yin and yang, a contradictory pair where we all seem to need both sides...Books on education, medicine, government, charity, religion, technology, travel, relationships, etc. mostly present relatively ideal...

I'm cynical about cynicism.  I don't believe that most cynicism is really about knowing better.  When I see someone being cynical, my first thought is that they're trying to show off their sophistication and assert superiority over the naive.  As opposed to, say, sharin...

Followup to:  Adaptation-Executers not Fitness-Maximizers, The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary "In a 1989 Canadian study, adults were asked to imagine the death of children of various ages and estimate which deaths would create the greatest sense of loss in a parent. The results, plotted ...