“I think sometimes some people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all.” - Cormac McCarthy
Primeira parte de uma série de artigos do escritor de ficção científica Neal Stephenson explorando o famoso ensaio “The Fixation of Belief”, de Charles Sanders Peirce (um dos pais da corrente filosófica nativa aos Estados Unidos e conhecida na cátedra como Pragmatismo). Ilumina a prevalência do erro nos sistemas de crenças humanas, dos menos aos mais sofisticados, e os desafios de alcançar a realidade objetiva.
“The tricky part, as Peirce points out, is that beliefs that seem "agreeable to reason" don't always agree with each other. Plato and Kepler were intellectual giants who thought deeply about these matters. Both came up with reasonable-sounding explanations of the planets' movements. Highly intelligent and well-informed people all around them nodded their heads sagely and said ‘that totally makes sense.’ But they were all wrong.
(…) They are evaluating evidence and drawing logical-seeming conclusions. But in the end, you can't get Plato and Kepler to agree. In circles where everyone follows the A Priori Method, you get a lot of people--probably smarter and better educated than most, and proud of being so--agreeing with each other as to what sounds reasonable. But there is no baseline for determining whether their conclusions are valid. It's how we get Internet bubbles, which is to say, groups of like-minded people on social media all vigorously agreeing with each other, certain that they’re right.
(…) Anyone who has ever sincerely believed in something, only to look back on it later in the full awareness that they were wrong, is on the path to being a Fallibilist; and when they encounter an idea haver who is sure they’re right, they see a more naive version of themselves.”
Um chamado à revisão do atual modelo descritivo das ciências sociais, em prol de novos paradigmas que trabalham melhor com a complexidade adaptativa. Uma crítica em particular à estatística excessivamente voltada à “normalização” de ocorrências atípicas e um bom resumo dos métodos da “ciência da complexidade” (complexity science) capazes de lidar com esse tipo de problema.
“Most linear regressions are also ineffective at modelling two fundamental facets of our world: sequencing, the critical order in which events take place; and space, the specific physical geography in which those events occur. The overarching explanations offered by linear regression ignore the order in which things happen, and though that approach can sometimes work, at other times the order of events is crucial. Try adding flour after you bake a cake and see what happens. Similarly, linear regressions cannot easily incorporate complex features of our physical geography or capture the ways that humans navigate through space. Social models tend to conceptualise changes at the macro level, through economic output figures or democracy scores, rather than seeing diverse, adaptive individuals who are constantly interacting on specific terrain. Life looks very different for people living in Antarctica compared with people living in downtown Mumbai or the Andes or outback Australia.
By smoothing over near-infinite complexity, linear regressions make our nonlinear world appear to follow the comforting progression of a single ordered line. This is a conjuring trick. And to complete it successfully, scientists need to purge whatever doesn’t fit. They need to detect the ‘signal’ and delete the ‘noise’. But in chaotic systems, the noise matters. Do we really care that 99.8 per cent of the Titanic’s voyage went off without a hitch, or that Abraham Lincoln enjoyed most of the play before he was shot?”
Sobre o conceito de “carcinização” intelectual, i.e. como grupos e povos, partindo muitas vezes de pontos de origem completamente distintos, atingem os mesmos princípios.
“It often happens to be the case that different groups of people or organisations have similar problems to solve. Unsurprisingly, they tend to invent similar systems for doing so; armies all over the world have uniforms and ranks, for example.
There is a lot of actual copying, often over surprising distances of time and space, but there’s also a lot of the equivalent of carcinization. All over the world, any economic system that’s too large to be based on single household production seems to end up inventing an equivalent of money and an equivalent of debt.”
A “taxonomia histórica” das curvas de adoção das mais diversas tecnologias. Uma interessante exposição indutiva, na contramão da narrativa moderna que equaciona adoção acelerada à adoção perene e generalizada.
Análise sóbria do economista sérvio Branko Milanović sobre a combinação (inusitada) de ideologias que formam o bojo do modelo Trumpista.
“It will be the policy of nationalist anti-imperialism. I have to unpack these terms. This combination is uncommon, especially for big powers: if they are big, nationalist and mercantilist, it is almost intuitively understood that they have to be imperialistic. Trump however defies this nostrum. He goes back to the Founders’ foreign policy that abhorred “foreign entanglements”. The United States, in their and in his view, is a powerful and rich nation, looking after its interests, but it is not an “indispensable nation” in the way that Madeleine Albright defined it. It is not the role of the United States to right every wrong in the world (in the optimistic or self-serving view of this doctrine) nor to waste its money on people and causes which have nothing to do with its interests (in the realist view of the same doctrine).
Why Trump dislikes imperialism that has become common currency for both US parties since 1945 is hard to say but I think that instinctively he tends to espouse values of the Founding Fathers and people like the Republican antagonist to FDR, Robert Taft who believed in US economic strength and saw no need to convert that strength into a hegemonic political rule over the world.”
Scott Aaronson, cientista da computação famoso por seu trabalho em computação quântica, discorre sobre uma excêntrica alcunha que criou para uma classe de “burocrata terminal”. Mais que um simples oficial rígido e preso em sistemas além da sua compreensão; o “Blankface” é uma figura auto-desumanizada, “Kafkaesca”, com capacidade suficiente para compreender um problema, mas com uma falta de empatia que conduz à renúncia voluntária de qualquer intenção de ajuda.
Uma antiga (e extremamente abrangente) palestra de Jared Diamond (autor do seminal Guns, Germs & Steel), relacionando a magnitude da fragmentação de territórios e indústrias, e a subsequente exposição (ou não) a pressões competitivas, sobre seu desenvolvimento no longo prazo.
“So, the lesson I draw is that competition between entities that have free communication between them spurred on Europe. In China one despot could and did halt innovation in China. Instead, China's experience of technological innovation came during the times when China's unity fell apart, or when China was taken over temporarily by an outside invader. You've seen that effect even in modern times. Twenty years ago, a few idiots in control of the world's most populous nation were able to shut down the educational system for one billion people at the time of the Great Cultural Revolution, whereas it's impossible for a few idiots to shut down the educational system of all of Europe. This suggests, then, that Europe's fragmentation was a great advantage to Europe as far as technological and scientific innovation is concerned. Does this mean that a high degree of fragmentation is even better? Probably not. India was geographically even more fragmented than Europe, but India was not technologically as innovative as Europe. And this suggests that there is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage. Instead, innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some intermediate degree of fragmentation.
(…)
I also derive the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don't want excessive unity and you don't want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other. And those I see as the overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich.”