Monthly Archives: June 2015

Continuing on the rationality-as-survival point…

Continuing on the rationality-as-survival point, there is a confusion when it comes to “rationality” of a decision between the *reduced* and the *structural* form, and the *static* and *dynamic* form:
+ a single decision vs. a RULE generating a sequence of decisions. One decision can be rational while the rule is not. It would be rational for me to eat tuna today but under repetition it would harm the planet so it is OK to keep switching preferences. We saw that intransitive preferences or random preferences can be very rational.
+ it may seem irrational to not take the direct route between 2 points, but under convexity of payoffs/nonlinear transformation it becomes so. You may discover a new direction.
+ local vs. global rationality. Mental accounting: say husband would not buy a tie by himself but his wife –with a joint checking account –gives it to him as a gift and he is excited. It could be irrational for a given instance but as a method it prevents people from splurging.
+ ludic vs. ecological environments. Some actions show biases in a casino and are irrational but real life is not a casino and these can be really rational. Life is ambiguous, laboratory settings are not.

NIETZSCHE

NIETZSCHE. I keep saying that there is no rigorous way to define rationality, except a risk-management one: “what prevents you or your species from extinction”, the foundation of our Precautionary Principle. All other definitions fail under rigorous formalizations and model expansion (for instance, see proofs in Chapter 6 in Silent Risk, most stuff called “irrational” by psychologists shows the psychologists to be Pinker-style verbalistic and ignorant of probability). We are, simply, very bad at knowing what “makes sense” ex ante; only time can do so thanks the Lindy effect (survival). This is the pillar behind *SKIN IN THE GAME*.
Excited to see Nietzche got the point!
” The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) …”
In Beyond Good and Evil, I, 4.
Why was this burried? Because scholars do believe in such sentence, given the zeitgeist of “rationalization”.
I need to thank an anonymous person on twitter.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche
The following is a reprint of the Helen Zimmern translation from German into English of “Beyond Good and Evil,” as published in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1909-1913). Some adaptations from the original text were made to format it into an e-text. Italics in the original book are capit…
gutenberg.org

This is a one-page answer as the journalist-passing-for-scientist Pinker…

This is a one-page answer as the journalist-passing-for-scientist Pinker has been working the press to show that violence has “dropped” since 1945, citing political science bloggers innocent of fat tails, who seem clueless about the difference between data and information. How to separate anecdote from evidence, sampling error from truth, journalism from science? Well there is something called a “test statistic”.
This also illustrates how to do rigorous statistics in the absence of a textbook recipe for a fat-tailed process, by means of Monte Carlo analyses.
I will be teaching a course called “Extreme Risk Analytics” at NYU-Engineering this fall and will have to produce an 80-p lecture notes booklet, which I will write progressively from interaction with the class. SILENT RISK is too advanced, so I need a more introductory book.

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/comment.pdf

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SAUDILEAKS

SAUDILEAKS
It is now safe to say that about anyone who ever said anything remotely favorable (or nonnegative) about the Wahabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was getting paid for it. Prostitutes.
This post isn’t about Saudi Arabia; rather about the purchase and sale of public “opinion”.

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