Category: opinion

If the responsibility for today’s reality loses meaning in the purer forms of collective dream- and tradition thinking, then facts also lose their meaning there. That is why Snyder warns against getting carried away by the dream- and tradition stories that attract dream- and tradition thinkers and that concurrently separate them. He recommends his audience…

Watched two presentations by historian Timothy Snyder on YouTube today. He dares. Sees sweeping relations. The strip of land between Russia and Germany as a unity, not in terms of nation state, but as an important political-historical unit. And the contemporary political histories of Russia, Europe and the US, not in terms of Marxism, the…

Good. I have been able to play with my new Python workbooks for two weeks now to find answers to the questions raised by the COVID-19 event, Node said to himself. Questions that are important and that are not clarified, not by officials affiliated with institutions, not by the experts who perform in the talk…

Today is Thanksgiving in the US, November 29, 2020. Our jurisdictions not only face the pandemic but also face the transition into market societies, running on deep learning and alphaZero-like algorithms. (Those born before 1993 can read The Creativity Code by Marcus du Sautoy as an excuse for a crash course.) My phone has become…

If phantom pain is the pain you feel in a sorely missing part of your body, then phantom knowledge is the knowledge you feel to have about a feat you sorely missed (see) performing. It does happen that phantom knowledge contributes to the Midas syndrome, the phenomenon that when you get what you want, the…

Reading the Data In Fig. 1, the numbers of new registered COVID infections and the numbers of new COVID deaths per week are given, as observed for the Netherlands. The black line (for the dead) represents the raw data. The red line (for the infections) shows the numbers in percentages (or: the raw contamination data…

Earlier I wrote this: Factions are (initially) small organized, deviant groups within a larger whole, for example in politics. Factions are endemic to that bigger picture. Endemic risks are those risks caused by factions threatening the whole. Mary Douglas shows in Risk and Blame how such risks are often identified and used by factions to…

Woodward summarizes Kushner’s characterization of Trump in Chapter 33 of “Rage.” As follows: “[…] on February 8, 2020, Kushner advised others on the four texts that he said someone in a quest to understand Trump needed to absorb. First, Kushner advised, go back and read a 2018 opinion column by The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer…

He had been building toy worlds for a while now, to show himself how they behave when his personal assumptions and narratives are played out when he stumbled upon a book review by James Gleick titled Simulating Democracy. It was not a completely unexpected shock: mimicking democracy using big data and neuropublicity techniques in what…

Mr. Sum started reading Woodward’s Rage yesterday. Fascinating and potentially useful for estimating how data, beliefs and networks play their roles in White House federal politics in the US. For helping to set up toy worlds that try to simulate the trade war, for example. It goes into detail about what Trump knew about the…