Briggs

Muggings, Nuclear Devices, Probability & Decision

Somehow I ended up on the curious site LessWrong.com, directed by somebody with the nickname Yud (from Eliezer Yudkowsky). Odd isn't in it. Investigating it led me to Reddit and…

Culture

Eastern Michigan To Install Zampolit In Every Classroom To Maintain Ideological Purity

Maintaining ideological purity requires constant vigilance. The Commissars in the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics knew this well. This is why they assigned zampolit, or political officers, to serve…

Statistics

Don’t Use Statistical Models (When You Don’t Have To. Which Is Nearly Always)

Today, a convincing argument proving the current practice of probability and statistics is mostly wrong, or wrong-headed. The picture above does---and does not---show herbicide use in several countries by year…

Culture Statistics

Science Asks: Why Are Angry Atheists Annoying?

What's more annoying than an atheist who harangues passersby about "rationality"? Easy answer: a scientist who announces a discovery about human behavior that was known by everybody since Adam. Our…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: More On The Possible Intellect

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT. Previous post. We're still…

Philosophy

Vatican Analyzes The Difference Between Humans And Robots

Soon a robot will ask you if you want fries with that. Computer screens already do, in some locales. How does that make you feel? Hungry? That could be taken…

Statistics

Scientific People Understand Reality Less, New Research Didn’t Study

Headline: Religious people understand the world less, study suggests, which derives from the peer-reviewed paper "Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs?" in Applied Cognitive Psychology…

Culture

Seventy-Five Years After Pearl Harbor

Holy moly. Shinzo Abe is going to visit Pearl Harbor "on Dec. 26-27 to pray for the dead". Who saw that coming? According to the linked report: "We must never…

JH on A Synchronicity Or Coincidence? What Is Behind Curious Events?March 10, 2026
The definition of cause can vary, and each incident may have its causes or contributing factors. I see coincidences as…
JH on The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AIMarch 10, 2026
AI can be ‘gullible’ because it takes all the information fed into its optimization or backpropagation system. In many tasks,…
Richard on A Synchronicity Or Coincidence? What Is Behind Curious Events?March 9, 2026
My son-in-law calls these "cosmic coincidences". We share with each other "interesting" or "unusual" ones we've each experienced. Of course,…
Brian (bulaoren) on A Synchronicity Or Coincidence? What Is Behind Curious Events?March 9, 2026
Funny, I was just thinking about synchronicity...
Jennifer on Class 81: The Second Biggest Error In Time SeriesMarch 7, 2026
Ran across this and thought you could be interested: A Combat Scenario-Based Model for Quantifying Ethical Decision?Making in Military AI…