Patrick Julius's Blog, page 10

Charity harassment

JDN 2456272 EDT 13:45.

 

I donate to a fair number of charities, including GiveWell, UNICEF, Kiva, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Secular Student Alliance, and the ASPCA. I also volunteer at the Humane Society of Huron Valley and generally give to Democratic Party candidates in major elections. I'm glad I do this; these organizations have done great things, and I'm proud to be part of that.

That said, it gets pretty annoying to be put on the list of "people who donate to charity"...

The Curse of Knowledge strikes again

JDN 2456268 EDT 14:56.

 

A review of Five Golden Rules by John Casti.

 

It's a problem that plagues many nonfiction writers. Steven Pinker called it the Curse of Knowledge; Less Wrong refers to it as Inferential Distance. The problem is this: You know what you know, but you don't know what other people don't know. So it's hard to explain things without going over people's heads or seeming condescending.

Five Golden Rules is supposed to be a book about cutting-edge mathematics for pe...

How capitalism distorts holidays

JDN 2456267 EDT 11:11.

 

It doesn't just feel that way; the Christmas season actually starts earlier every year. This year, the season literally started before Thanksgiving. We didn't really have Thanksgiving, except as part of Christmas. Include New Year's and the week after, and we now have a Christmas season that lasts almost two months.

Don't get me wrong; I like Christmas, even as an atheist. Family rituals and gift-giving are very important in almost every culture, and most culture...

Radicals and Revolution

JDN 2456265 EDT 10:08.

 

I do not consider myself a radical or a revolutionary. It could be argued that I have some radical ideas, because I would like to see many things about society change, some in fairly drastic ways. And I could be considered a radical of the Saul Alinsky school: "true revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They put on suits and infiltrate the system from within."
But what differentiates me from the people I would think of as radicals is that I don't see ou...

Asymmetric Julius-Hofstadter equilibrium

JDN 2456262 EDT 15:06.

 

I made a mistake in my earlier post in which I proposed the idea of Julius-Hofstadter equilibrium. You can't actually diagonalize the payoff matrix, at least not for certain games. Even some symmetric games can't be diagonalized.

For instance, consider the classic "Chicken" game, which actually I think should be called the "Right-of-Way" game because it only describes "Chicken" if you're aggressive and irresponsible, whereas it describes the right-of-way at an in...