This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Jan 2008, by Tanja Nagel.
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21 Jan 08
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Problem is there is a winner’s bias. To paraphrase a winemaker, tradition is an experiment that worked. A religion originally thrives because adherents find it improves their lives. Sometimes faith is a way to cope with the horror of the present and to improve health and survival. (Suppose there is any regional basis for the coincidences in Kosher and Halal restrictions?) But most religions, and most countries, forget they became powerful by continuously experimenting, learning, tweaking, improving. They begin to ossify myths and traditions. As others grow and thrive, they begin to fear change. They celebrate the past, becoming more nativist and xenophobic.
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Who is truly powerful over the long term? Those running most of the successful experiments.
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many U.S. leaders proudly proclaim no evolution and little knowledge of science. They reflect a core of scared voters experiencing massive disruption and declining wages; that core fears elite education, science, immigrants, open borders, and above all rapid change. As income and knowledge gaps widen, many fall further and further behind; many grow to hate an open, knowledge driven economy. Change is rejected, blocked, vilified.
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Agreement Theorem of Nobel Prize-winning game-theorist Robert Aumann. His theorem can be roughly paraphrased as follows: Two individuals cannot forever agree to disagree.
An important definition allows for a slightly fuller statement. Information is termed "common knowledge" among a group of people if all parties know it, know that the others know it, know that the others know they know it, and so on. It is much more than "mutual knowledge," which requires only that the parties know the particular bit of information, not that they be aware of the others' knowledge.
Aumann showed that as agents' beliefs, formed in rational response to different bits of private information, gradually become common knowledge, their beliefs change and eventually coincide. -
Maybe people don't kill and die simply for a cause. They do it for friends — campmates, schoolmates, workmates, soccer buddies, body-building buddies, pin-ball buddies — who share a cause. Some die for dreams of jihad — of justice and glory — but nearly all in devotion to a family-like group of friends and mentors, of "fictive kin."
Then it became embarrassingly obvious: it is no accident that nearly all religious and political movements express allegiance through the idiom of the family — Brothers and Sisters, Children of God, Fatherland, Motherland, Homeland, and the like. Nearly all such movements require subordination, or at least assimilation, of any real family (genetic kinship) to the larger imagined community of "Brothers and Sisters." Indeed, the complete subordination of biological loyalty to ideological loyalty for the Ikhwan, the "Brotherhood" of the Prophet, is Islam's original meaning, "Submission." -
Our data show that support for suicide actions is triggered by moral outrage at perceived attacks against Islam and sacred values, but this is converted to action as a result of small world factors. Out of millions who express sympathy with global jihad, only a few thousand show willingness to commit violence. They tend to go to violence in small groups consisting mostly of friends, and some kin. These groups arise within specific "scenes": neighborhoods, schools (classes, dorms), workplaces and common leisure activities (soccer, mosque, barbershop, café, online chat-rooms).
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11 Jan 08
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