ofthewedge

rooting around for grubs in diverse soils

Factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio

US tech bros warning that their frontier LLMs are going to end civilization unless government cement their monopoly power regulate them remind me of the urban legend about Bono in his most pompous pontificating pomp.

In a concert about 20 years ago your man pivoted from rock music to earnest NGO’ing, commanding silence punctuated with his own one second claps, and lecturing his audience that everytime he clapped, some poor fucker died of poverty, to which a Glaswegian in the mosh pit shouted, ‘So stop clapping then, yacuntya!’

2 responses to “Factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio”

  1. ianadreyer Avatar
    ianadreyer

    😂👏🏼

    Reply
  2. jameswenz Avatar
    jameswenz

    Palpable example of a cognitive bias. Statistics tricks our brain to find this sooo compelling, welcome cum hoc ergo propter hoc. concurrent occurrence, so one must be the cause of the other. But coming from the other direction it’s the smoking gun’s post hoc ergo propter hoc assuming a sequential cause. Temporal proximity as proof of a causal relationship: when the mob is asking for a head to be chopped it’s difficult to argue. There’s another friend in this congregation: at each clap one death somewhere. The apparent correlate is time itself. The Madame Soleil scientist connects two variables of two more or less continuous processes et voilà: hidden science that was hidden for you for so long, was revealed. But on a deeper level, it also tells the story of the incredible human cognitive survival skill of pattern recognition, and that can go overboard when taking the face or dog you see in a cloud as something more than apophenetic pattern or causal projection into materially unrelated phenomena. And in complex and stressful times when you feel left out, angry and frustrated you like to look for a guilty one who’s to blame: the EU, the government, parents, God or devil, gay or Jew which from behind the statistician’s desk is called confirmation bias but that is more commonly and ritually known as scapegoat, blight-fully ignoring the millions of instances where nothing coincided.

    Now that we mentioned statisticians: Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller showed that with a large enough sample size, highly improbable coincidences are practically guaranteed to occur. Look no further: you found your cause.

    Reply

Leave a Reply