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Wednesday, May 22, 2024 - 23:28 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Know Thyself

A public holiday called for some additional reflection and personal stock-taking, which yielded the unavoidable conclusion that it's really not at all bad; I consider all my obligations discharged, and have gathered sufficient resources to, well, do essentially anything with the rest of time - within normal bounds - if need be (as some others have done, moreover at an earlier age). Hop between countries? Write one's own grants and research whatever catches my fancy? Go all-in on full-time health optimization? All is possible.

So, with the effective freedom to pursue anything, the automatic follow-on question becomes what one truly wants. For myself, it has not changed from a decade ago, and probably beyond - the knowledge and understanding of causality in general, that infinite and inexhaustible art. Apprehending something that is, why did it happen? Given the current state of reality, what will happen next? Alongside (and quite often complementing) my "official" profession and title(s), it is an interest that I have never abandoned, and consciously taken care to cultivate. New information, possibly useless at first sight, continually organized into one's mental map - what does it relate to? What does it connect to? What are its implications? What hypotheses might be born from it? Input begets output, which themselves compose fresh inputs, in an endless loop*.


Core Of Being

Admiral: This is a nuclear-armed aircraft carrier, the largest ship in the fleet of the most powerful nation on Earth, with its command personally commissioned by the President himself. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand that you change your course, or all possible countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship.

Reply: I am but a humble and nameless lighthouse keeper.
But it's your call, really.


There is an old, and slightly juvenile, quiz involving embarking on a trip with five animals: a cow, a horse, a lion, a lamb and a monkey. Unbeknownst to the subject at the beginning, he will have to abandon an animal at each of four succesive stops along the difficult journey; the order in which they are left behind, and the only animal retained, is then interpreted as to what one values most in life.

I will not reveal my own answer here, but my answer to that last question is simple: to know the truth and the cause of things; to be free to communicate the truth and the cause of things; and to be myself. My other goals are, then, largely ancillary to the above. And frankly, the striving for such has been kind to me, materially and otherwise, over the past years. Having received the reward, then, I am bound to provide the service: that there should be at least one person in the world, who is willing to provide his honest best interpretation of a situation - and the likely effects - without fear or favour.

On this, I defer to my track record on investing, on election forecasting (oft against mainstream media propaganda, i.e. against the odds), and most recently the Twilight Struggle: New Moon series of posts that has seen a number of foreshadowed events come to be (e.g. on the exact three cities of Berlin/Paris/London coming under Russian nuclear threat, the Taiwan provocation and ensuing blockade in July 2022, the Nord Stream revelations, Afghan arms under new ownership, China's Middle East diplomacy and its effects on Israel, Russian tactical nuke threats [just reemphasized] and the probable accompanying demands and why they would be ignored, TikTok as strategic propaganda and why the U.S. would eventually ban it** whichever party holds the Presidency etc.)

Sure, many or all of the above might now be dismissed as obvious on hindsight - and I will be the first to admit that such prognostications are never 100.00% accurate - but the key point is that they were not random guesses. In each case, there was a mental map, a model, from which the conclusions were derived. The map can be updated, of course, as the facts or circumstances change; however, at any particular point in time, if asked, the best-effort answer comes from the model.

Yet once again, these answers and predictions have got nothing to do with anybody else - think of it as the habit of actually working out a (math) problem by oneself, rather than turning to classmate(s) for the solution (i.e. social mimicry), or flipping to the back of the textbook (i.e. media propaganda). If my opinion concurs with someone, it does not imply approval in other respects, and vice versa; appearances are irrelevant too*** - the answer might be scrawled in crayon by a fellow clad in rags, but if it is accurate, then so it is.

Of course, I do understand that there are instances where the point is minor or largely irrelevant, or where there are good reasons to defer commentary for later out of expediency. As learnt in Vegas, manners are quite important, and I'm quite willing to play the role of dutiful listener as required by social convention. This should not be misconstrued as unqualified agreement, of course, and in such cases I suppose I prefer to fall back on silence, rather than try to finesse out of it - on the accuracy of my statements, I am as ever entirely willing to let Time be the judge of their correctness... eventually.

只求因果。


[*Such metacognition could be the missing piece preventing general AI from approaching true (super)human capabilities, but more on this next time.]

[**This comes together with Biden doubling to quadrupling a raft of tariffs on China (after personally holding up my flight home from Seattle, dang it) - which he had previously consistently berated TRUMP for - the cause and necessity of which was explained last September with reference to production. Well, as pointed out with reference to the TikTok issue, we all know where this is going lah.]

[***Which is why I enjoy (double-blind) reviewing so much (over a thousand papers and counting, thus far) - one gets to constructively critique and improve studies, without feelings getting hurt, or status anxiety due to (academic or political) rank imbalances on either end; where there is genuinely an error or misunderstanding on my end, as most recently when I recommended a flowchart having missed it already included in supplementary material, I am happy enough to apologize.

This is in contrast not so easy to pull off in person. Just for example, at the vision conference I recently attended, one poster presented purported improvements in diagnosis results due to an extension of a technical thingamajig... but apparently without comparison against the original thingamjig. I'm not certain there was any good way to raise this concern at that stage, without potential embarrassment.]



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