Category: motto

  • A COVID-19 interim report (2): Uncertainties

    When the Wuhan outbreak was brought under control, it turned out that around 86,000 registered infections had resulted in around 4,700 deaths. In week 11 of the pandemic (around March 18), I roughly estimated that the expected percentage of fatal infections in the Netherlands could be around 5%. Is that correct? Why didn’t I know…

  • Winners and Losers

    Things are getting closer in the US, 79 days before the presidential election. The spectacle is fascinating to outsiders. For me, it started in mid-2019 when I was trying to understand what was feeding and driving the China-US trade war. I thought of a simulation game as a research tool. I made an ABSM design…

  • A Hypothesis

    Mr. Node summarizes what he ventured to deduce from the infection, death and reproduction numbers. Assuming that there are such things as mean incubation times and mean durations of fatal disease beds, the question is how to estimate them. A single glance at the picture for phase 1 for the Netherlands shows that the curves…

  • Requirements for a Leviathan Game

    From the summary you can read the requirements of what a Leviathan game must meet. We need individuals who inhabit a piece of land together and who may or may not create or abolish jurisdiction. Individuals must therefore be able to (refuse to) enter into an agreement that designates a sovereign (individual or institution) who/that…

  • Modeling the State of Nature

    Hobbes’ Leviathan is written in separate paragraphs. Chapters XIII (of the natural state of humanity, regarding their happiness and misery) & XIV (of the first and second laws of nature and of contracts) have all the information needed to model that natural state in an agent-based system that mimics the behavior that Hobbes uses to…

  • Two types of networks

    Networks are strange things, Mr. Node thought. It seems like there are two types of them. One for forest fires and one for logistics. The networks that arise when you strive for an average R0 value create the dynamics of the forest fire: By R0 = 1, most trees are too far apart to light…

  • Endemic risks

    Populist factions that aim to protect against endemic risks may well be a necessary condition for collectivist hate to emerge, I stated somewhere. A few concepts are taken for granted here. For instance factions and endemic risks. Factions are small organized dissenting groups within a larger one, especially in politics. Factions are endemic to the…

  • Why We Hate

    Yesterday I saw parts I & II of the TV series Why We Hate. It is a documentary television series showing an “exploration into the human condition of hatred […]“, directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Sam Pollard. The series is on the dynamics of hatred and shows a mixture of science and journalism. These are…