Nate Silver, in his new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, creates a geographical metaphor to describe two different types of people with two different modes of thinking. Nate lays out a geography of “The River”[1] as follows: He finishes with: “The people in the River are my…
Category: Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
Algorithms
SCA 3: “The Bold” vs. Wayne Newton Fans
I begin today expanding upon my previous analysis of Nate Silver’s distinction between “Riverians” and “Village People.” Silver says that River People possess the following two “clusters of attributes”[1]: COGNITIVE CLUSTER PERSONALITY CLUSTER Analytical Competitive Abstract Critical Decoupling Independent-minded (contrarian) Risk-tolerant “Analytical” – Nate says this is “to resolve something complex…
Artificial Intelligence
This Was Predictable…
A new book is out by the journalist Tom Chivers, author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy and How to Read Numbers. The Wall Street Journal likes it. Kirkus Reviews calls it “An ingenious introduction to the mathematics of rational thinking.” Oliver Burkeman wrote, “Life is shot through with uncertainty, but in this fascinating,…
Artificial Intelligence
The Horserace Part 4: “The ‘Paul’s Dead’ Election”
I have frequently here decried the quality of our national political media outlets, writing that they focus on the horserace, not the impacts electing one or another candidate might bring to all of us. Many people have jumped (surely unknowingly) on my bandwagon, saying they want “less about the horserace,…
Algorithms
Rigorous Imagination, Scenario 1: AI and 2024
September 18, 2023 Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been one of the most discussed issues of the calendar year. As it happens, it’s a nearly perfect test case for the approach outlined in my forthcoming book, Fatal Certainty: How a Cult of Prediction Made the Twenty-First Century an Era of Strategic Shock…
Artificial Intelligence
The Truly Strategic May Be the Intrinsically Human (AI vs. Rigorous Imagination)
[excerpt from Fatal Certainty] … Every algorithmic predictive system ultimately must be created out of whole cloth, its equations, variables, operands, etc. representing some reality completely outside of our computer systems, which we would like to predict. And every element of an algorithmic system represents an assumption about how something…