Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged prediction →  View Popular

But that ain’t where he’s at. Mulligan still enjoys a blogger position at the New York Times, and still spews incoherent freemarket dribble and economic predictions, which proves that for the idiots running this country, it’s all about the “free markets” and the “free pass for whatever fuckup I make, no matter how disastrous the consequences for you!”

You might say, "this isn't futurism, it's simply responsible thinking"--again, sorely lacking in much of our current discourse. But you might notice that conventional analysis that looks at horizon issues (implications, blowback, and the like) rarely gets combined with conventional analysis that looks at scope issues (relationships, reinforcement, interdependencies). Carrying off that kind of combination is hard to do, and especially hard to do well.

Any claim of inevitability is difficult to prove. Convincing proof requires re-running a progression more than once and showing that the outcome is the same each time. That no matter what perturbations thrown at the system, it yields an identical result.

Park Benjamin, author of the Age of Electricity, observed in 1901 that "not an electrical invention of any importance has been made but that the honor of its origin has been claimed by more than one person." Dig deep enough in the history of any type of discovery in any field and you'll find more than one claimant for the first priority.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

The second more substantial sense of "inevitable" demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology's use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum, and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can't be diverted by mere social whims.

But most genetic diseases or phenotypes are not monogenic.  The genomic predictors are typically spread between several loci, or many loci, or, as we have come to realize lately, a very large number of loci. Genome wide association studies have revealed that, if anything, only a few diseases are explained by looking at common population variants. Even then, the combination of common variants usually predicts only a low single digit increase in susceptibility.

The Styx was a simple Soviet design that had been in service for years when it sank the Eilat. Like the longbow, antiship missiles were just not taken seriously because they were cheap peasant weapons, whereas if you were roaring around in an ex-Brit destroyer, you were somebody. It’s that simple. That stupid.

Bayes developed a statistical method to evaluate the probability of any given hypothesis being true under changing conditions. The concept is straightforward: The probability of two things happening together is the probability of the first given the second, times the probability of the second. This allows the certainty of a single inference to be weighed according to how much additional evidence exists at any particular time. The "Bayesian" approach has emerged in many guises over the past century and has proved very useful in computer science applications like machine learning.

But a delusion that lasts for decades is not a delusion. It's an institution. And these, our institutions, are what now fail us.

Declaring that "information wants to be free" is an ideological stance. A real-world situation where information can't be anything but free, where digital information cannot be monetized, is bizarre and deeply scary. No banker or economist anywhere has the ghost of clue what to do under such conditions.

In that way I think the talk succeeded. Uncountable number of people let me know that they had "never even thought about" the next 1,000 years of their faith. I got the sense they did not know they were allowed to. 

"By forming a thread that connects otherwise separate experiences, integrative encoding permits organisms to generalize across multiple past experience to guide choices in the present," explains Dr. Shohamy. "In people who generalize successfully, the brain is constantly building links across separate events, creating an integrated memory of life's episodes. For others, although the brain may accurately remember each past event, this integration does not occur, so that when confronted with a new situation, they are unable to flexibly apply what they learned in the past."