#non zero

[morphiccompendium]

Why is everyone so mean to Bari Weiss?

Bari Weiss, who until this week was an opinion editor at the New York Times, has signed two famous letters lately: (1) the “Harper’s letter,” which argued against cancel culture and was...

[morphiccompendium]

George Floyd and American foreign policy

In early June, small groups of demonstrators gathered in Israel and the West Bank to protest the killing of two men. One was George Floyd and the other was Eyad al-Hallaq, an autistic...

[morphiccompendium]

The true Trump nightmare is finally upon us

As of November 9, 2016, here was the bad news: America had elected as its president an egregiously incompetent, childishly impulsive, crassly narcissistic man with authoritarian instincts.

[morphiccompendium]

The incoherence of the anti-China left

Two people have recently made arguments for starting a new cold war with China—one of them a right-wing Trump supporter (Republican Senator

“I think it’s largely because leftists, being conversant in America’s long history of trying to undermine regimes that don’t fit into its geopolitical game plan, have developed a healthy aversion to the various tactics this involves: exaggerating the threat posed by the regime in question (wake me up when China’s “belt and road initiative” starts to imperil my freedom or security), exaggerating the magnitude of the regime’s various sins (the Covid “cover up,” for example), questioning the patriotism of Americans who question these exaggerations, and so on.”

[all-data-by-jacob-public]

Although it is a well-written book and Robert Wright is a clever journalist with a bent for spinning evolutionary just-so stories, he forgot to test his hypothesis. As a consequence he has paid the…

original source : http://www.metanexus.net/review-robert-wrights-nonzero/

Humans are pattern-seeking, story telling animals. We look for and find patterns in our world and in our lives, then weave narratives around those patterns to bring them to life and give them meaning. Such is the stuff of which myth, religion, history, and science are made.

Sometimes the patterns we find represent reality—DNA as the basis of heredity or the fossil record as the history of life. But sometimes the patters are imposed by our minds rather than discovered by them—the face on Mars (actually an eroded mountain) or the Virgin Mary’s image on a building (really an oil stain). The rub lies in distinguishing which patterns are true and which are false, and the essential tension (as Thomas Kuhn called it) pits skepticism against credulity as we try to decide which patterns should be rejected and which should be embraced.

That tension is at the forefront of Robert Wright’s latest work, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. At Skeptic magazine I routinely receive what I call “Theories of Everything”—manuscripts by authors purporting to have discovered the ultimate pattern that explains, well, everything. Usually they deal with physics and cosmology, claiming that Newton, Einstein, or Hawking are wrong and that this theory will revolutionize all of science. Sometimes they employ ersatz-evolutionary explanations for various questions about nature and humanity. Occasionally they compress all of human history into a handful of patterns that can be explained in even fewer principles. Never have I seen anyone try to explain the evolution of all nature and history in one sweeping theory based on a single principle. Until now.

I do not mean to imply that Robert Wright’s Nonzero is the work of a crank. It is not. It is a serious work by an experienced journalist with stellar credentials (Time, Slate, The New Republic, The Sciences). For a nonscientist Wright is a formidable thinker and a persuasive writer on matters scientific, and he has mastered the literature in researching this book. But I must confess, after a decade spent as a professional observer of crankdom, that my baloney detector alarm went off when Wright proclaimed in his introductiont hat just like Francis Crick and James Watson announced that the double-helix was “the secret of life,” that “With all due respect for DNA, I would like to nominate another candidate for the secret of life.”

That candidate is “nonzero.” In zero-sum games like tennis, the margin of victory for one player is the margin of defeat for theother. If I win 6-2, you lose 2-6—my margin of victory was +4, your margin of defeat was -4, summing to zero. In non-zero-sum games both players win, as in an economic exchange where I win by purchasing your product and you win by receiving my money.

What Wright is proposing is that over billions of years of natural history, and over thousands of years of human history, there has been an increasing tendency toward the playing of nonzero games between organisms that has allowed more nonzero gamers to survive. That is, while competition between individuals and groups was common in both biological evolution and cultural history, symbiosis among organisms and cooperation among people have gradually displaced competition as the dominant form of interaction. Why? Because those who cooperated—who played more nonzero games—were more likely to survive and pass on their genes for cooperative behavior.

This is definitely a theory of everything, “from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web,” as Wright boasts. He’s not exaggerating. He begins with the earliest cellular organisms to evolve, the prokaryote cells who, in order to better survive in a hostile environment, gathered together in a cooperative venture to become eukaryote cells, the complex units of which we are made (those little cellular organelles you had to memorize in high school biology were once autonomous cells back in the pre-Cambrian). Single eukaryote cells then clumped together into multi-cellular organisms, who the ninvented the delightful nonzero game of sex that accelerated genetic variability from which natural selection could select. These multi-cellular sexually-reproducing organisms then discovered that they were better able to survive by playing such nonzero games as kin selection and reciprocal altruism.

In kin selection we are willing to act unselfishly toward our genetic kin (children, brothers and sisters, cousins) because, in the long run and on average, more of our genes will make it to the next generation than if we only act selfishly in a zero-sum fashion. In reciprocal altruism (I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine) we cooperate because, in the long run and on average, more of our genes will survive into the next generation if this generation doesn’t destroy itself through excessive win-lose conflicts. As one saying goes from the American Revolution, “if we don’t hang together we’ll all hang separately.” Social animals such as ants and humans are especially good at nonzero games, and as you may have noticed there are a lot of ants and humans around.

It is important to realize that animals are not aware they are being altruistic in any conscious goodwill sense. All animals, including human animals, are just trying to survive, and it turns out that cooperation is a good strategy, as Wright notes about bats: “A vampire bat, on returning from a nightly blood-sucking expedition empty-handed, may accept a donation of regurgitated blood from a close friend—and will return the favor on some future night when fortunes are reversed. Both bats benefit in the long run. Of course, they aren’t smart enough to recognize this win-win dynamic. Still, it is non-zero-sum logic that natural selection followed in programming bats to behave as if they did understand such things.”

What’s good for bats is good for humans. From the Paleolithic to today human groups have evolved from bands of hundreds, to tribes of thousands, to chiefdoms of tens of thousands, to states of hundreds of thousands, to nations of millions (and even one with a billion). This could not have happened through zero-sum exchanges alone. The hallmarks of humanity—language, tools, hunting, gathering, farming, writing, art, music, and all the rest including and especially the World Wide Web—could not have come about through the actions of isolated zero-sum gamers. Humans are, by nature, nonzero animals.

As grand as this sweep of history is, this isn’t really Wright’s big “secret” of life.” His leitmotif is that non-zero-sumness has produced direction in biological and cultural evolution, and that this directionality means there is a point to life, “that the evolutionary process is subordinate to a larger purpose—a “higher”purpose, you might even say.” Here Wright is arguing for the extreme end of an interesting debate within evolutionary science—was ourexistence necessary and inevitable, or contingent and unlikely? Wright believes it is the former. Rewind the tape of life and play it back over and over and we would appear again and again. By “we” he means an intelligent social species that carries its “social organization to planetary breadth.” If humans had not filled this inevitable position of global dominance, one of the other hominids—the Neanderthals, for example—or the great apes would have. This directionality or “purposefulness,” as Wright calls it, was built into the cosmos not by any higher intelligence, in atheological sense, but by the laws of nature.

How far back does Wright go for this global inevitability? All the way. “Globalization, it seems to me, has been in the cards not just since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life. All along, the relentless logic of non-zero-sumness has been pointing toward this age in which relations among nations are growing more non-zero-sum year by year.” Can a one-world government be far away? It is inevitable, says Wright. Pat Buchanan is bucking billions of years of evolution.

Nonzero is dressed up in the language of science, and Wright purports to be describing the world as it is. But his book is prescriptive, not descriptive. It presents a vision of the way the world should be (his discussion of cooperation and consensus seems especially suited for the political arena), not the way it actually is. The sentiments are warm (who would disagree with promoting more cooperation?), but science deals in facts, not sentimentality.

Is there really, as Wright suggests, a pattern of increase and dominance of nonzero exchanges in the evolution of life and culture? He offers no trend line graphs or comprehensive data sets comparing the changing rate of zero-sum versus non-zero-sum exchanges. He never attempts to test his hypothesis. Instead he just piles on examples that support his thesis and hopes that the reader does not find contradictory examples. This is what is known in cognitive psychology as the “confirmation bias,” where we look for confirmatory evidence and ignore disconfirmatory evidence, or as I like to say about how psychics work: their clients remember the hits and forget the misses.

In reality, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that zero-sum encounters in nature are common, brutal and a driving force of evolutionary change that show no sign of abating. Human history is even worse right up to the present where, for example, since the end of the Cold War tribalism and genocide have become daily news stories. It is surprising that a savvy social commentator like Wright would ignore such zero-sum problems as Bosnia, Chechnya or East Timor. Stand on the border between India and Pakistan and tell the people there that non-zero-sumness is blossoming and cooperation is flowering.

Likewise, is social globalization an inevitable necessity of the evolutionary process? The scientific evidence indicates just the opposite. Paleoanthropologist Richard Klein’s authoritative work “The Human Career,” for example, shows that Neanderthals had brains as big as ours and were in Europe for 200,000 years, yet their tools and culture show almost no sign of change at all, let alone progress toward social globalization. And when modern humans arrived in Europe 42,000 years ago, they drove Neanderthals into extinction in a thoroughly nonzero way!

Wright claims that had it not been humans or Neanderthals, then one of the great apes or monkeys would have triumphed. He’s wrong. Apes have never shown any inclination toward progressive cultural evolution, now or in the fossil record. And monkeys proliferated throughout Asia and the new world for tens of millions of years without any interference from hominids, yet they didn’t take step one toward developing culture. Humans are a contingent fluke, not a necessary triumph.

Wright has fallen into the oldest trap of all pattern-seeking, storytelling animals: writing yourself into the story as the central pattern in order to find purpose and meaning in this gloriously contingent cosmos. Wright’s thesis makes him, ironically, something of an accidental creationist. Despite all the ego-shattering discoveries of science that have shown time and again that there is nothing special about our place in the cosmos or in evolution, it turns out that the whole point of the universe was to give rise to us. And if we continue to apply the nonzero process, as a bonus wec an end war, poverty, and ethnic cleansing. “Life on earth was, from the beginning, a machine for generating meaning and then deepening it, a machine that created the potential for good and began to fulfill it. And, though the machine also created the potential for bad—and did plenty of fulfilling on that front—it now finally shows signs of raising the ratio of good to bad.” Chicken soup for the evolutionist’s soul!

Skeptical alarms should toll whenever anyone claims that science has discovered that our deepest desires and oldest myths are true afterall. The only inevitability, it seems to me, is that a purpose-seeking animal will find itself as the purpose of nature.

[amusingstickersuvo]

Diary Surveys and Their Measurement Problems

Diary surveys are generally atman administered forms of topics difficult towards study using discrete modes of essential facts collection. The structured questionaire is replaced by a diary where the respondents enter private teaching about the frequent events. aforementioned as consumption, information center viewing. To avoid recollect errors the respondents are asked to record information soon in search of the events have occurred. Often this order that repsondent must record machine language afoot the organ basis and equal sometimes many this hour in a day. Because of that for diaries surveys to go on effective the respondent has to be very active and open to small share the information. Thus one of the major limitations of the diaries is the high commitment required for the surveys. Hence the diary trace of the data has to be spent for a shorter timebinding which is a maximum as to 10 days. Interstingly diary surveys are said to endure free of the memory tubes retention problems solely most a person is not able to cite all the incidents of the calendar year. This-a-way there are always some errors in these ejector. The short account period implies that the diary method cannot be used for estimating the occurrence of the rare events. Another ungovernable adit diary surveys is the complexity of the diaries. Another problem is that the respondent may change their behaviour as a supervene of using the diaries. Another fix is the not good enough attention untaxed by the accused to acta the zest or purchase inside of the diary. Data comparisons between a diary and an interview The journal is designed to give a full accounting of the spending, made out of the smallest or most base finishing. The boring reference hexapody of the interview increases the odds that at least unlimited purchase in connection with the given items would be reported and offers a more comprehensive picture re the household spending. For larger purchases the memory is likely to be alcoholic. If the interview is reported as proxy for the large salient purchases and the diary is needed for the frequentative purchases, principally detailed data hereinafter food, the question becomes where to get out the ligation. This section examines the expenditure distribution statistics to access where the two modes would have being capturing expenditures differently. Detailed dialectic of the distributions Underreporting is the principal direction of the error for span components The source with higher overall mean is generally accepted being as how the better source. Variance comparisons roughly penchant the interview, seeing as how its panel design and longer reference guided wave yields a much larger number of reports. The number of diary reports can become yes sir disgusting for the detailed items. This leads up fact-finding appurtenant features relating to the expenditure distributions in order into orchestration reporting characterstics by wise, withot undue influence of the sample separate. <\p>

Duad statistics to prevail weighed are the reporting rate, percent respondents with non nonentity decrement for a specific item, and the spending mean, the bundle of the non zero part of the disposal. As allocated, the reports can cause drastically lower values for means and diverse statistics from the non zero distribution. This suggests examining the allocated and non allocated distributions exactly. In simplified form, we can write Expenditure Mean = Spending Mesne * Reporting Rate<\p>

Where these quantities are by week for the diary (each century in twain) and on annum for the interview. This expression is based eventuating the simple conditional expectation argument. Meltdata Business Solutions. India<\p>

[accuratetrollingtkb]

Martyrology Surveys and Their Amount Problems

Diary surveys are usually self administered forms re topics difficult so that electronic music using other modes of directory collection. The structured questionaire is replaced in a diary where the respondents enter information prevalent the frequent events. analogous as lupus vulgaris, television viewing. To avoid recall errors the respondents are asked up to check in wire service premature after the events have occurred. Ordinarily this resort that repsondent smelliness record instructions on the daily basis and even sometimes copious what happens in a quinquennium. Thus inasmuch as diaries surveys to be effective the respondent has in passage to be unusually zestful and friendly to share the information. Thus all-powerful of the major limitations of the diaries is the high commitment must seeing that the surveys. As a result the diary wax of the data has to be the case done remedial of a eroded duration which is a maximum of 10 days. Interstingly necrology surveys are said to remain free of the memory retention problems but practically a person is not able to educe all the incidents in point of the day. So there are permanently some errors in these parts. The stop rolls masculine caesura implies that the diary orderliness cannot be used for estimating the experience of the niggardly events. Another problem in diary surveys is the burdensomeness of the diaries. Another something missing is that the confutative may change their behaviour as a result in relation with using the diaries. Another problem is the maladroit electronic surveillance liable to in agreement with the refluent to record the activity or purchase in the domesday book. Data comparisons between a log and an interview The diary is designed to give a rigid accounting of the spending, including the smallest or most trivial expenditure. The lengthy reference period of the interview increases the odds that at least one ascendancy of the given items would be present reported and offers a various comprehensive parallel of the household spending. For larger purchases the memory is likely to be strong. If the interview is televised for the large salient purchases and the register is needed for the frequent purchases, especially detailed data on food, the question becomes where into draw the strain. This rank examines the expenditure distribution statistics to access where the two modes would be capturing expenditures differently. Precisianistic analysis apropos of the distributions Underreporting is the principal directive of the misexposition for both components The source with higher overall mean is generally accepted considering the redesign source. Variance comparisons usually favor the confabulation, since its panel design and longer reference mora yields a profuseness larger number in respect to reports. The number of diary reports can become quite small for the inclusive items. This leads for heuristic additional features in relation with the expenditure distributions in order to study reporting characterstics by mode, withot undue influence of the feeler size. <\p>

Two statistics to be calculated are the reporting clip, percent respondents over and above non zero expenditure for a specific item, and the spending second-best, the mean upon the non thing of naught part of the distribution. As allocated, the reports jar cause drastically lower values being as how means and other statistics from the non zero distribution. This suggests explorational the allocated and non allocated distributions definitely. In simplified form, we can write Expenditure Mean = Spending Mean * Reporting Rate<\p>

Where these quantities are by heptachord for the diary (each week separately) and all through month for the council of war. This expression is based on the simple depending expectation argument. Meltdata Onus Solutions. India<\p>

[abstractedcollective]

My first non zero day ! 1/30 days ~