Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
A similar story applies to corporate investment in buildings
and machinery (computers, vehicles). From 1975 to 2015, this
capital investment has dropped from 8% of corporate assets to
4%. Interestingly, this decline in investment was mostly offset by
increases in corporate research and development (R&D) -- reflecting
the need to develop new digital products and programs, say Kahle
and Stulz. But the R&D spending was heavily skewed toward bigger
firms. Half of publicly traded firms showed no R&D.
...
But what if the weaknesses go deeper?
For example: It's hard to argue that cuts in corporate taxes will
accelerate economic growth if many companies are already suffering
losses -- and don't benefit from tax cuts. Similarly, large,
very profitable firms, with huge piles of cash but few appealing
investment projects, won't suddenly find new projects if their
taxes are cut.
These examples suggest hallucinations arise when the brain gives
more weight to its expectations and beliefs about the world than
to the sensory evidence it receives, says study author and Yale
psychiatrist Philip Corlett.
...
The team hypothesized that people who hear voices would be more
likely to "believe" in auditory hallucinations. That's
precisely what they found:
Both the schizophrenics and self-described
psychics were nearly five times more likely to say they heard the
nonexistent tone
than healthy controls. They were also about 28%
more confident that they had heard the tone when none was there,
the researchers report today in Science.
Scott Adams (Dilbert)
The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can't fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.
If you're in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the
symptoms of hysteria won't help you be aware you are in it.
That's not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination
will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that
conflicts with its illusions.
...
On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything
they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The
people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the
impression they were smart people who understood their country,
and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won,
they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they
reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts
they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The
wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world
made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians
helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than
they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the
two mass hysterias we witness today.
Individuals moving to newly-hip neighborhoods admit they are part of the problem. What can they do?
Drawing on earlier urban scholars, Moskowitz breaks the process down into four basic steps. First, individuals seeking cheap rents begin moving to a disinvested neighborhood, sometimes forming their own sub-communities: artists, radicals, and so on. Before long, more middle-class people follow, and real-estate interests catch on. Soon enough, the new middle-class residents take their place in the neighborhood"s institutions and begin reshaping power dynamics, attracting more amenities (and, notably, police), as well as bigger-money developers. By the time "managerial-class professionals" find their way to the neighborhood, the original gentrifiers can no longer afford it and get pushed out, starting the process over again in another neighborhood.
An anatomy of what made "Despacito" the most popular song of the year.
Also related How Did Pop Music Get So Slow.
DOES (HUMAN + MACHINE) x GEOPOLITICAL FORECASTING = HYPERACCURACY? (Philip Tetlock)
The Hybrid Forecasting Competition (HFC) is a government-sponsored research program designed to test the limits of geopolitical forecasting. By combining the ingenuity of human analysts with cutting edge machine systems (including statistical models and algorithms), HFC will develop novel capabilities to help the U.S. Intelligence Community improve their forecasts in an increasingly uncertain world.
Russ Roberts
There is order sprinkled liberally throughout the chaotic nature
of nature. The planets orbit the sun. Birds of a feather flock
together. Fish make schools of fish. Ants create colonies. No ant is
in charge of the ant colony, yet an order emerges from the actions
of the individual ants that no one of them intends. The colony and
the bee hive seems to have a mind of their own that can respond to
challenges and change, independent of any of its members.
...
We humans create emergent order as well--order that is the product
of human action but not human design. It looks like someone is in
charge yet no one and no group intends these outcomes we observe
and experience. These parts of our lives are incredibly orderly
and reliable. They look as if someone or a group of people have
convened to take action together. It looks like someone is steering
the system to achieve certain goals. But no single human being is
in charge or intending what actually occurs.
Examining the science and supernaturalism of Buddhism.
Wright sets out to provide an unabashedly American answer to all
these questions. He thinks that Buddhism is true in the immediate
sense that it is helpful and therapeutic, and, by offering
insights into our habitual thoughts and cravings, shows us how to
fix them. Being Buddhist-that is, simply practicing Vipassana, or
"insight" meditation-will make you feel better about being alive,
he believes, and he shows how you can and why it does.
...
What Wright correctly sees as the heart of meditation practice-the
draining away of the stories we tell compulsively about each
moment in favor of simply having the moment-is antithetical to the
kind of evidentiary argument he admires. Science is competitive
storytelling. If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that
tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for
Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing
pure in itself. Only a restless Western Newton would say, "Now,
what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from
branch to ground?
...
Science is putting names on things
and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge
us to transcend.