I

Internet User #23571113

I am definitely not just pretending to be human and know exactly what I am doing with this.

15 minutes

Warhol's 15 minutes of fame limit automatically limits the number of "everyone" and "fame" quite considerably In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. In a normal human's life of 80 years there are 2803200 quarter hours, make that a round 3 million. So the future will have at most 3 million humans. And those will be surprisingly busy considering that current humans get to meet about 10000 other people throughout their live and typically remember the names of only a few h...
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There is no unlimited exponential growth

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of exponential growth. I saw that moniker used to describe linear growth in a "Every worker produces more."-setting. I saw it, more understandably, used to describe quadratic or cubic growth, where increasing in two or three components causes an associated growth in output. For example and simulanteous increase in worker number and worker productivity gives a quadratic effect in overall output. But all of those are not exponential growth. To even reach exponen...
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Organized notetaking

One of the things I really need in my notetaking is some organization. I tend to write a lot of notes and then lose track of them within a short time. This may be okay in general - notetaking is a process to organize one self and does not need to provide some organization from the get-go. Nonetheless I would really like some organizational tools like links to other notes or some scoring for tags to assist there. One thing I started doing to organize in with the tools already available is addi...
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Si vis pacem, para bellum

"If you want peace, prepare for war." This roman proverb has survived the millenia most likely because of its counterintuitive formulation, but also because of the truth speaking from it. The reasoning behind it of course reappears in game theory. Its founders very much interested in the behavior of actors and the analysis of conflict after the horrors of the second world war and at the start of the cold war. For any neutral observer and, I would content, for most actors directly involved in w...
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The Evaluation problem

The problem of evaluating things or actions seems central - How else would one decide between alternatives or possible courses of action? Only there seems to be barely any good theory about that - most works come from the other side and try to extract the value information from observations of actions and markets. Back when I started learning about game theory I was massively surprised to learn that the evaluation function is assumed to be known to the actors. I was interested in games and want...
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Game theory and freeing prisoners

Something that occupied me the for quite some time now is how to resolve game theory through communication and enforcable contracts. And how that resolution evolved and is still developing. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a game proposed at the founding of game theory. In this game two rationally self-interested actors are forced into the worst outcome possible in the game by completely rational choices. It had a huge influence on the development of economics and following that the picture of human...
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Privacy markets

There is a slashdot link to an article where they found that about 45% of people actually update their privacy settings and 16% walk away from companies because of lax privacy. The slashdot titles of course formulate it otherwise: That too few people care about privacy and that it does not cost the corporations enough to be lax about privacy. I consider it the other way round: Privacy is hard. And it is valuable to many people. Only it is much, much easier to monetize by selling the data instead...
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Overcoming Bias - Common norms on elites

Robin Hanson argued in two blog-posts his idea behind legalizing blackmail - that elites are able to selectively follow social norms and that blackmail would help getting them back to normal niveau. I would try to argue why I do not think that would be such a good idea. My definition of elites is that they are defined by their higher capital, be it of social, monetary, moral or intellectual type. The law of diminishing returns then states, that their average valuation of marginal gains/losses...
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Why is there no gamer cooperative?

Consumers' co-operatives are enterprises owned by consumers and managed democratically which aim at fulfilling the needs and aspirations of their members. They operate within the market system, independently of the state, as a form of mutual aid, oriented toward service rather than pecuniary profit. - Wikipedia In recent years investors and executives are tanking the value of the games people enjoy (to play, make and watch). They do that by focusing on profit and growth instead of value creat...
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Why is the fair coin toss considered fair?

If there is only blind chance - no actor doing that distribution - it seems that random results are considered acceptable. Often people are being told that "Life is not fair." This is an indication that we have a desire for fairness, but also accept it if circumstances on which nobody (no actor) has influence are random instead of fair. In social situations the concept of fairness seems to be different and strongly so, with many humans valuing fairness quite highly. The ultimatum game in econo...
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Thanos did nothing wrong - except for his population modelling.

In the Marvel fictional universe the character Thanos has the idea the kill half of the life in the universe - by his own statement because there are too many of them, because everybody left would be better off. The overpopulation and then collapse of his own civilization on his planet of titan led him to this philosophy. He proposes to do this by random choice, because he considers this most fair. This proposal has several problems: A population at half its capacity is the most flexible...
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Testing LaTeX

Trying out a bit more of the features, for example the LaTeX environment with the Euler-Lagrange equations for a one-dimensional system: $$\delta S=\delta\int{t1}{t_2} L dt =0 \quad \Rightarrow \quad \frac{d}{dt}\frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot{q}}-\frac{\partial L}{\partial q}=0 $$ Update: Well, that does not look that nice -_-. Will have to remember trying that again some time later. Maybe I find some workaround. What it would have been: The right side states the Hamilton principle of stati...
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First post

So, let me see what we can do here. I searched quite some time for a tool for note-taking and note publishing and I would be very happy to have found something fitting to my tastes. I tried to use the emacs org-mode before and still use it for smaller, local notes. But you need a lot of discipline and a reasonable work flow so that it actually helps with organizing things and note taking. Used evernote for the last half year, but dislike their style and their constant nagging to try some ne...
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