Links 2024-04-18 - Simply Interesting

Some food for thought

Let’s begin with Gurwinder offering up his regular batch of (this time) 30 Useful Principles. I particularly like these:

3. Herostratic Fame:

Many people would rather be hated than unknown. In Ancient Greece, Herostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis purely so he’d be remembered. Now we have “nuisance influencers” who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout.

8. Benford's Law of Controversy:

We tend to fill gaps in information with emotion. We fear what we don’t understand, love what we naively romanticize, etc. As such, the things that fire people up most are usually the things they understand least.

10. Safetyism:

After US schools banned peanuts because some kids had allergies, more kids developed peanut allergies from lack of exposure. We’re increasingly protecting kids from life, which only makes them more vulnerable to it. Too much safety is dangerous.

15. Nutpicking:

Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy.

The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.

27. Agenda-Setting Theory:

Most of the time, what’s happening in the news isn’t actually important, it only appears important because it’s in the news. The public conversation is based on whatever's reported by the press, giving the impression that this news matters most, when really it's just what was chosen by a few editors and thoughtlessly amplified by the masses.

28. Compassion Fade:

“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”

When presented with two appeals for charity—one based on famine statistics and one based on a single starving girl—people tend to donate much more to the girl.

Our minds can’t grasp big numbers, so we navigate the world through stories, not statistics. We’re moved by drama, not data.

Next is from Steve Landsburg. If this isn’t counter conventional wisdom, nothing is. Newcomers should go to the FRONT of the line to make the world a better (more efficient) place.

Next is from Josh Hendrickson explaining how price theory can explain the archaic practice of trial by battle.

This is an application of what I would call the Law of the Hidden Rational Explanations. It is an offshoot of Chesterton’s Fence. Don’t be too quick to judge the strange past or the present practices of different cultures. There is likely more than meets the eye including good, at times remarkable, brilliance at work.

Hendrickson explains,

In other words, the hiring of a champion is a mechanism to get people to reveal something about their true valuations of the property. Of course, the battle meant that even those with a lower willingness to pay still had a chance to win the dispute. Nonetheless, the reveal of value was what was important. The reason is that most trials by battle were actually ended without a battle. Instead, the two parties settled the dispute prior to battle. Why? Because the hiring of champions revealed private information about the valuations of the property by both parties. Once the champions were known, the parties had some idea about the probability of victory. In that circumstance, with valuations revealed, the parties had an incentive to settle.

Next is from Michael Huemer demonstrating when infinities are possible and when they are impossible.

After identifying two common infinity paradoxes, Huemer presents a meta puzzle:

So you just read about two paradoxes. Here’s another puzzle that results from comparing those paradoxes:

• The solution to Zeno’s Paradox seems to be to reject (3). I.e., to argue that it is possible to complete an infinite series, since we do this every time we move.

• The solution to Thompson’s Lamp seems to be that the lamp is impossible, as Thompson suggested. Why? It appears to be because it is impossible to complete an infinite series.

I.e. the answer to the first paradox is the negation of the answer to the second paradox.

Well, presumably not. Rather, this pair of examples shows that some infinite series are completable, while other infinite series are not. Why is the Zeno series completable but the Thompson Lamp series not? The two series are very similar to each other on their face, so this is a puzzle.

I’ll leave it to the reader to click through for the solution.

Finally Dynomight explores tastes using a bit of game theory and a bit of social psychology.

Why do you like what you like? Is it because you genuinely like it in a pure sense, or because you are supposed to like it? Or something else?

After hitting a lot of areas that might hit close to home for yourself, he starts his conclusion:

You’ve probably noticed this theory is hard to falsify: You think you’re not playing taste games? You think you “actually like” things because of the properties of those things? That’s because you’re playing higher-level games! And isn’t it rather convenient that this is all supposed to be unconscious?

And there’s this weird sense of guilt. If you consciously change your tastes so you can fit in, that’s bad. If you unconsciously do that, that’s worse. If you unconsciously don’t try to fit in, you’re scum.

Read it all to see if you don’t agree it is, like I said, interesting.