Archives for category: Bounded rationality
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Context

February 18, 2025 //
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“You are permitted in time of great danger
to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge“
Bulgarian Proverb

““The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.”

Bulgaria is a Balcanic country. Having evolved more or less together, the Balcanic countries share many cultural traits. Nevertheless, individual countries do have their own characteristics. Bulgaria does have a particular one.
The name, Bulgaria, comes from a Turkic tribe. Who had conquered the area in the VII-th century and established the first Bulgarian Empire. Yet the Bulgarian people is mainly Slavic. Speaks a Slavic language and has remained Christian Orthodox despite having been ruled directly by the Islamic Ottoman Empire from 1396 to 1878. Hence it is safe to consider that the Bulgarians do know a thing or two about keeping their shit together, don’t you think?

On the other hand, who, in their right mind, would want to find themselves on the other side of the bridge? Alone with the devil?!?

Maybe ‘devil’ has different meanings for different people…

We, in our cozy world, where everything is just about fine, consider the devil to be the absolute evil.
We are taught to believe that.

Yet things were not so clearly cut in the good old days.

The Bulgarian experience suggests that when the shit hits the fan, maybe it is wiser to put aside some of the things which made you consider your neighbour was ‘untouchable’ and join forces with them. Until the real danger is gone…

An even older experience, the one shared in the Bible, suggests that the Devil had a defining contribution in us becoming ‘like one of them (Gods)’. After all, it was ‘he’ who had taught Eve to eat the fruit which empowered her to “know good and evil”. It was ‘he’ who prodded Eve, who prodded Adam, to become conscious human beings…

Let me continue this post by sharing a story. Not a funny one but which fits in this context.

Once upon a time, there was a nonconforming sparrow who decided not to fly south for the winter. However, soon the weather turned so cold that he reluctantly started southward. In a short time, ice began to form on his wings and he fell to earth in a barnyard, almost frozen. A cow passed by and crapped on the little sparrow. The sparrow thought it was the end. But then the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings. Warm and happy, able to breathe, he started to sing. Just then a large cat came by and hearing the chirping, investigated the sounds. The cat cleared away the manure, found the chirping sparrow and promptly ate him.
Now, it may seem that there are no lessons here, but there are. In fact, there are three:
1. Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
2. Everyone who gets you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.
3. If you’re warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut.
Allen Klein

I’m not sure about 3. though. Keeping your mouth shut is not always the best option. Not in the longer run…
Use your better judgement instead of letting others tell you what to do.

Having just told you to use your own better judgement instead of letting others tell you what to do, I now suggest that you click on the following link. And read Niemoller’s life story:
https://hmd.org.uk/resource/pastor-martin-niemoller-hmd-2021/

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, complementary ways of attending knowlege, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, religion, skin in the game

And/Or

February 17, 2025 //
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It’s one thing to be able to see white from black.
And a lot more complicated to see black and white…

Being reasonable means listening to what the world has to say about things.
Being reasonable means being open minded.

Being rational means balancing your means with your wishes.
Being rational means actively identifying resources which might help you attain your goals and the pitfalls you need to avoid.

Being reasonable means choosing goals which ‘do not disturb’.
Being rational means transforming things into what they should be. Into what you think they should be…

Being reasonable means getting along.
Being rational means going alone.

Being reasonable means trying to get all in.
Being rational means being able to get to the bottom of it.

The point being that evolution is about the species, not about the individual.
And this point can be made out but individually…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust

A reminder

February 1, 2025 //
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History never repeats itself.
Only keeps teaching a lesson until we actually understand it.

‘In 1936, Hitler boldly marched 22,000 German troops into the Rhineland, in a direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler offered France and Britain a 25 year non-aggression pact and claimed: “Germany had no territorial demands to make in Europe” ‘.

“In the summer of 1938 Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland into Germany. At this point Hitler was aware that the Allies were desperate to avoid war, and thought it likely that they would appease his demands.
Hitler threatened war over the issue of the Sudetenland. On 29 – 30 September 1938 the British, Italian, French and German leaders met in Munich to discuss the issue.
The Allies agreed to concede the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for a pledge of peace. This agreement was known as the Munich Pact.”

“On May 3, 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin fired Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov, who was Jewish and an advocate of collective security, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov, who soon began negotiations with the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Soviets also kept negotiating with Britain and France, but in the end Stalin chose to reach an agreement with Germany. By doing so he hoped to keep the Soviet Union at peace with Germany and to gain time to build up the Soviet military establishment, which had been badly weakened by the purge of the Red Army officer corps in 1937. The Western democracies’ hesitance in opposing Adolf Hitler, along with Stalin’s own inexplicable personal preference for the Nazis, also played a part in Stalin’s final choice. For his part, Hitler wanted a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union so that his armies could invade Poland virtually unopposed by a major power, after which Germany could deal with the forces of France and Britain in the west without having to simultaneously fight the Soviet Union on a second front in the east.“

What is the lesson here?
That each tyrant believes they can outwit all other tyrants.
That tyrants are convinced they can outwit democratic alliances.
That, in the end, all authoritarian regimes fail. Abysmally. For the simple reason that inability to accept their own faillings makes all authoritarian leaders incapable of coping with change. Unable to adapt. Unable to evolve. Hence all authoritarian regimes are inherently fragile.

And who suffers the consequences?
We do. All of us. “World Wide Wars”, remember?

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

An Explanation

January 28, 2025 //
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American Society Was Built for Populism, Not Elitism
“Technocrats and elites insist that centralized control is best.
Nature and history prove them wrong.”
Karl Zinsmeister, WSJ

Really?

“Tax billionaires out of existence?!?”

And what would be accomplished by doing that?

‘Yet another ‘trickle down theorist’…’

Nope!
Trickle down is an idiocy. It doesn’t work.
Just like ‘taxing billionaires out of existence’. It has been experimented, you know…
It was called communism by those promoting this brilliant idea. So brilliant that it burnt down every society which had tried it.
I lived under communist rule. I know.
There isn’t much difference between all money being controlled by the state/government and too much money being controlled by a handful of billionaires! Meaningful decisions are still being made by a too small number of people…

Yes, taxes are useful.
Besides gathering money to be used, by the government, for the common good.
My point being that taxes are an expression of how a society sees money.

That’s what’s needed. Decision makers who do not put money over everything else!
Any attempt to ‘tax billionaires out of existence’ is already an abuse of power.
Doing it before the society changes its understanding of the matter would be worse than a crime. It would be a horrible mistake.

High marginal taxes accomplish two things. If no loopholes are allowed.
Balance the budget and change the minds of the decision makers. ‘CEO’s’ as well as shareholders.
Convince them to reinvest a bigger share of the profit. Which makes it possible for the company to become more efficient. Which makes it possible for the company to increase wages.
Balancing the budget with money brought in by taxing the high earners makes it possible for the politicians to lower the taxes paid by the Regular Joes. Which would improve their status, their self esteem and their buying power!

Blaming a section of the society for something which needs to be dealt with in concert, by all the members of a society, is counterproductive. To say the least.
It does nothing to solve the real problems and it deepens the already existing rifts.

Blaming the billionaires for what’s going on – for everybody being obsessed with money – is in no way different from blaming the immigrants for most of the people being unsure about tomorrow.

Billionaires, as well as the immigrants, should be ‘exploited’ rather than driven into disappearance.
Each of them are very good at what each of them are doing.
The difference between them consists in the fact that the billionaires set their own wages.

Wages, all wages, are paid by us. By the consumers. Hence it is us who should determine how much each people should get. We, not some of those getting our hard earned money!
How are we going to accomplish that?
Making sure that the market remains free. Functionally free as opposed to controlled by a small number of people. No matter where they come from. The Government, as in communism, or a collection of monopolies. As in oligarchic capitalism.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crises, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, limited rationality, man induced fragility, skin in the game

A warning

January 26, 2025 //
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Celebratory meme posted by ecstatic Trump 47 supporter a few days after the inauguration.

True enough.

Only living in a world where everybody is scared… isn’t that much fun!

Not even for those who have managed to amass all the money in the market.

As somebody who has lived under both communism and not yet free market capitalism I must stress that there’s little difference between communism and monopolistic capitalism presented under the guise of democracy.
Between a social order where all power – political, economic, social, you name it – is concentrated in the hands of a few self selected people pretending to protect the interests of the people. A social order described by those calling the shots as being a ‘popular democracy'(?!?).
And a social order where all power – …. – is concentrated in the hands of the few people who have amassed all the riches in that particular society. And who, behind manipulated -and no longer liberal – democratic mechanisms pretend to protect the interests of the people.

The problem with both situations being the fact that a few people – no matter how capable and/or well intended, if that is the case – cannot manage, over a sizeable amount of time, such a complex thing as a society. Period.

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crises, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

The Difference

January 20, 2025 //
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Being able to ‘see the difference’ is what makes us able to considerate.
The result of our considerations…

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to spot the difference between a spot and a curve.
You don’t even need to be able to read…

Every adolescent steps out of the straight and narrow. Time and time again. And is told by his elders to toe the line. Until they learn that stepping back into the fold is easier than remaining an outlier for the rest of their natural life.
Only the fold is no longer were it used to be… It has reached its current position because those who had the guts to explore have done that for the rest of us. Experimented being outliers. So that we, all of us, did not have to experience every possibility before choosing where to go next. They, the outliers, found out what was ‘out there’ and told us.

I’ve already made a few considerations about the two pictures above. About some of the differences between the top and the bottom ones. I’ve left the main one for today’s post.

We do have a certain bias towards conformity. We do, socially and statistically speaking, tend to follow the trend. Like all other social animals.
After all, no society/herd can function – as a group, when all its members behave ‘outlierly’. So much outside the trend as to buck it.
The difference between the top and the bottom ‘graph-s’ being the attitude towards the situation.

The top one comes with the ‘normal’ bias. Each normal individual does have a certain ‘something’ against the ‘outlier’ situation and a certain affinity for the comfort of being trendy. But we have learned to respect the outliers, for as long as they don’t hurt us. For as long as they don’t rock the boat so much as to get us seasick.
The bottom graph states from the beginning that only the outlier opinion is valid. That no matter how many people continue to follow the trend, they are wrong. Even worse, they are insignificant. Hence disposable.

OK, there have been instances when the trend was leading in the wrong direction. Quite a few.
Yet people have somehow managed to survive. They stuck together, realized the outliers who kept warning them were right and followed them out of the dire situation they found themselves in.
But in each and every situation where an outlier had declared the rest of the ‘mob’ to be insignificant/disposable, and had enough traction to act upon their convictions, the situation had to become worse before people realized they had to change tack.

Before the people had realized they were following the wrong outlier!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, skin in the game

Superposition

January 19, 2025 //
1

Two things cannot exist
simultaneously
in the same place

Logic, ‘the correct way of thinking’, starts from the notion that no two things can exist, simultaneously, in the same ‘place’. Not even in our own head… Until they do, actually.

I’ll make a break here and tell you about Oscar Hoffman. A Romanian Teacher.
Who kept telling us, those who had the privilege to hear him teaching,
‘It’s not enough for a proposition to be valid from the logical point of view. It also has to make sense. Epistemologically speaking.’

The bottom part of the picture describes a stance which does make some epistemological sense and is seriously deficient when examined logically.
The top part is logically correct but also includes the meaning hidden in the bottom part.
Let me elaborate.

“100% irrefutable study that is proof and absolutely statistically significant.”
Absolute BS.
No scientific study has ever proved anything. Other than the facts examined confirm, or contradict, the hypothesis being tested during that study. Hence the hypothesis is allowed to stand, temporarily, as a theory or declared to be wrong.
A single study being claimed to be ‘absolutely statistically significant’ is so outrageous that it isn’t worth any comment.
“100% paid studies with an agenda and of little to no value or significance whatsoever”…
Nowadays 99.99% of the studies do involve money changing hands. Scientists have to eat and ‘money’ want to learn things. Hence ‘agendas’, on top of ‘money’.
‘Little to no value’ makes a lot less sense. If those studies yield results without any “value or significance whatsoever”, then why is any money involved and any time spent? To discuss about them, let alone to put them together….
To fit an agenda?
The scientists involved – all of them?!?, “100%” – are frauds and all those paying the hefty sums of money are suckers?
Then how can be explained the huge technological leap and the scientific breakthrough we currently witness?

‘Outlier’ versus ‘General trend’, is a far more ‘logically sound’. But also a lot more vague… The first proposition/picture, when examined with an open mind, does include everything claimed by the science deniers and the conspiracy speculationists. An outlier can be right, all change starts with one, and trends can be wrong. As all of them end up being…

So. What will it be?
Are we going to let ourselves be divided into warring camps?
Or understand ‘superposition’? Accept that having an agenda is not necessarily bad and that money is an excellent servant but a horrible master?
Or continue the current trend? Until we will have killed each-other along the line of divide et impera while repeating at nauseam ‘greed is good’?

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, In English, man as a measure for all things, Money, skin in the game, teleology

‘Murder, He Says’

January 16, 2025 //
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“Thou shalt not make unto thee
any graven image, or any likeness of any thing
that is in heaven above….“
Exodus 20:4

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

And it thus becomes obvious that Nietzsche has been falsely accused. It wasn’t he who had murdered God! He was simply the first who had the guts to write His death certificate…

My point being that what we call ‘God’ is a man made image. A concept.
It doesn’t matter, for this analysis, whether there is an actual god or not. What we call God is nothing more than our image of one.

And it had been enough. For a while.
For as long as we have followed the rules we ourselves had established to guide our own behavior – as in written them down – the God we’d imagined worked as intended. ‘Religion’ did what it was supposed to do. People had a ‘spiritual environment’ in which they behaved both coherently and cohesively.
Coherently and cohesively enough to evolve from slaves – owned and/or owners – to equal rights owning/yielding citizens.
Coherently and cohesively enough to evolve from horse driven war chariots to the M1A3 Abrams tank.
Coherently and cohesively enough to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ to the tune of 8 billion. Give or take. Not all of them following ‘the rules’ but all of them benefiting from the results of those rules having been followed for a while.

Yet, when things were unfolding so smoothly, why have we given up following those rules?

Have we outgrown the need for a shepherdly Father? For a Ghost to frighten us unto doing the right thing?
Or have we become so infatuated with our own ability to think, to reason, that we have turned it into an idol? Against all odds…
Despite having been warned about it!

Pascal’s wager is about turning the tables on ‘God’.
The image we made for ourselves about God, the ‘Holy Gost who frightened us unto staying on the straight and narrow’, convinced us to behave in a constructive manner. Benefiting the entire community.
The argument made by Pascal was made to convince us, individually, that we – each of us – should believe in God for their own sake. For their own benefit!
Effectively transforming each individual belief into an idol… ‘Graven’ by each individual, upon their own soul, in the likeness of things in heaven, for their individual use… Transforming the community creating God into an individual tool designed and believed to ‘give’ each of us ‘everything’.
Individually. As opposed to making it possible for everybody to exist.

As Nietzsche observed, by making Pascal’s wager – by transforming faith into a rational thing – we have collectively killed God. The same God which has made us possible.
Against everything we have been warned about, by our wise ancestors, we have replaced God with ourselves. So that we “gain all”. Individually. Each of those who had made the rational decision…

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology

Head scratch

January 14, 2025 //
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“Intelligence is the ability to think, reason, and understand
instead of doing things automatically or by instinct.
Nerve cells, after all, do not have intelligence of their own.“

Theoretically, we do have a certain understanding regarding the thing we call ‘intelligence’. After all, there are some dictionary entries discussing the matter.
But when it comes to measuring the said intelligence… nothing is straightforward anymore. So we still have a lot to learn about the thing. About our ability to understand, after all… About our ability to understand, period, including our own intelligence.

Click the picture above and read the article. It is interesting. The most interesting part being what it misses.

The first really intelligent computer application put together by man was the one who defeated Garry Kasparov.
Has anyone been invited to play chess by an application?
Is anybody aware of any chess or go application who had any initiative? Meaningful initiative? Other than making this or that move only AFTER a human had initiated the game?

What are we discussing here?
The intelligence level of any of the many, present or future, artificial intelligence applications or their ability to become aware? Aware of anything…

Furthermore, when we discuss whether AI, ANI, AGI or even ASI would erase humankind from the face of the Earth… nobody has yet mentioned us. After all, we are the ones building the applications. The computers on which we run the applications…
Instead of worrying whether any of the AI versions would do anything to us, we should worry about what some of us will do after they will have laid their hands on a really powerful AI application!

““There’s going to be things we do and the superintelligences just get fed up with the fact that we’re so incompetent and just replace us.”
Nearly 10 years ago, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla Motors, told American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that he believes AI will domesticate humans like pets.
Hinton ventures that we’ll be kept in the same way we keep tigers around.
“I don’t see why they wouldn’t. But we’re not going to control things anymore,” he said. “

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

“I don’t know!”

January 11, 2025 //
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Total BS. ISS distance from Earth is 408 km.
So, the Moon should be…
I don’t know. You do the math.
In this picture, it looks like ISS is orbiting the Moon, not the Earth.”
Somebody on the Internet

“I don’t know. You do the math!”
But you do have the right to express your opinion, right?
Me

„I disapprove of what you say,
but I will defend to the death your right to say it”
Voltaire

Oui maître, mais…
‘I will defend to the death your right to make a fool of yourself. To demonstrate your ignorance…’
OK, I get it. Only your attitude stems from your conviction that everybody who is able to read is also able to understand the meaning of what they read…
Which is no longer valid!

What do we need to do?
Educate? The readers…
Censor? The aberrant? And who will ‘put the stamp’?!? Who will be the trusted arbiter playing God?
Wait till the consequences of our laisez-faire will rattle their skulls against our crossed bones?

Or simply wake up?
Remember that mutual respect is paramount for our collective survival.
And that asking before sentencing is the smart thing to do….

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, Trust
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