The Book War, And The Mention Of Google Books Sends Shivers Down Their Spines

[Eurasian Adam]

In effect, as Kardaras (2022) notes in Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis--and How to Restore Our Sanity, our tech addiction, which leads to compromised mental health, can also lead to digital brainwashing. Whatever you choose to call it, like the roach motel—once you go in, you can never get out. Or can you? Nicholas Kardaras himself has found that, yes, there is a way out of the Matrix, and, like Neo, there is a red pill that we can take to regain our individual and collective sanity in this modern digital madness.

The Schizophrenic Society

[Eurasian Adam]

Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand

[Wunder-Zeichen]

THE POWER OF WRITING IT DOWN

Good things come to those who write. I'm thrilled that this book will help so many people benefit from the power of putting words on the page, learning through Allison Fallon's firm but friendly instruction both why and how to develop their own writing practice—because words can change everything.

If you're looking for inspiration or for how-tos, you'll find both here.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3559459854

[Wunder-Zeichen]

Culture, Religion, Epidemics and War

By Dean Brooks · 2023

A crisis is coming for everyone who uses math and science. For decades now, the classical model of probability (the indifference principle and the Gaussian distribution) has been breaking down and revealing its limitations in fields from economics to epidemiology. Now a new approach has revealed the underlying non-classical principle behind all these 'anomalous' laws:

Pareto’s law of elite incomes, Zipf’s law of word frequencies, Lotka’s law of scientific publications, Kleiber’s law of metabolic rates, the Clausewitz-Dupuy law of combat friction, Moore’s law of computing costs, the Wright-Henderson cost law, Weibull’s law of electronics failures, the Flynn Effect in IQ scores, Benford’s law of digit frequencies, Farr’s law of epidemics, Hubbell’s neutral theory of biodiversity, Rogers’ law of innovation classes, Wilson’s law of island biogeography, Smeed’s law of traffic fatalities.

The general law behind all these particular laws (and countless others) is the "decline effect". As a system ages or grows in size, the rules of probability subtly change. Entropy increases, rare items become rarer, and average performance measures decline. The human meaning of a decline may be positive (decreasing costs, falling epidemic mortality) or negative (lower customer loyalty, decreasing efficiency), but the mathematical pattern is always the same. The implications are enormous, as these examples show:

All epidemic diseases decline in infectiousness and in lethality. HIV-AIDS went from a highly infectious, 95-percent fatal disease, to a survivable condition with a latency of decades. COVID-19 went from a death rate of 7 percent in early 2020, to under 2 percent in 2022. Hereditary dynasties around the world declined smoothly in lifespan, from hundreds of years to tens of years. When democracies replaced monarchies, the decline (in spans of party control) continued.

In the late 1990s Dean Brooks first came upon a remarkably simple set of curves that can model how long a political dynasty (or a comic book series) will last, how fast a religion (or an epidemic) will spread, how many new stores WalMart or Burger King will open in the next decade, the growth of the human fetus, the distribution of competing species in an ecosystem, and countless other phenomena. It turned out that these curves had already been observed and given dozens of names in different fields. But how could such simple patterns apply to such a fantastic diversity of phenomena? And why had no one else written about the similarities until now? The search for a unifying explanation led the author to a new view of basic probability, using multiple overlapping Bayesian reference frames and the maximum entropy principle. Based on concepts from physicist Edwin Jaynes, and the mathematician George Spencer-Brown, Dean Brooks has produced a scientific and philosophical manifesto -- a radically new way of looking at the world.

More Thoughts on the Decline Effect