According to Overcoming Bias, Show-Off bias is a problem that self-described smart people have when giving solutions to problems. In short, they’re more likely to favor an exotic or complex explanation over a simple one, just because it pleases their ego more to discuss it.

I’m a believer in it.

[ Show-Off Bias | Overcoming Bias ]

This post shows someone expressing disappointment with some future predictions given by Kurzweil back in 1999. Here they are as documented by the poster:

• Individuals primarily use portable computers
• Portable computers have dramatically become lighter and thinner
• Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry, like wrist watches, rings, earrings and other body ornaments
• Computers with a high-resolution visual interface range from rings and pins and credit cards up to the size of a thin book. People typically have at least a dozen computers on and around their bodies, which are networked, using body LANS (local area networks)
• These computers monitor body functions, provide automated identity to conduct financial transactions and allow entry into secure areas. They also provide directions for navigation, and a variety of other services.
• Most portable computers do not have keyboards
• Rotating memories such as Hard Drives, CD roms, and DVDs are on their way out.
• Most users have servers on their homes and offices where they keep large stores of digital objects, including, among other things, virtual reality environments, although these are still on an early stage
• Cables are disappearing
• The majority of texts is created using continuous speech recognition, or CSR (dictation software). CSRs are very accurate, far more than the human transcriptionists, who were used up until a few years ago
• Books, magazines, and newspapers are now routinely read on displays that are the size of small books
• Computer displays built into eyeglasses are also used. These specialized glasses allow the users to see the normal environment while creating a virtual image that appears to hover in front of the viewer
• Computers routinely include moving picture image cameras and are able to reliably identify their owners from their faces
• Three dimensional chips are commonly used
• Students from all ages have a portable computer, very thin and soft, weighting less than 1 pound. They interact with their computers primarily by voice and by pointing with a device that looks like a pencil. Keybords still exist but most textual language is created by speaking.
• Intelligent courseware has emerged as a common means of learning, recent controversial studies have shown that students can learn basic skills such as reading and math just as readily with interactive learning software as with human teachers.
• Schools are increasingly relying on software approaches. Many children learn to read on their own using personal computers before entering grade school.
• Persons with disabilities are rapidly overcoming their handicaps through intelligent technology
• Students with reading disabilities routinely use print to speech reading systems
• Print to speech reading machines for the blind are now very small, inexpensive, palm-size devices that can read books.
• Useful navigation systems have finally been developed to assist blind people in moving and avoiding obstacles. Those systems use GPS technology. The blind person communicates with his navigation system by voice.
• Deaf persons commonly use portable speech-to-text listening machines which display a real time transcription of what people are saying. The deaf user has the choice of either reading the transcribed speech as displayed text or watching an animated person gesturing in sign language.
• Listening machines cal also translate what is being said into another language in real-time, so they are commonly used by hearing people as well.
• There is a growing perception that the primary disabilities of blindness, deafness, and physical impairment do not necessarily. Disabled persons routinely describe their disabilities as mere inconveniences.
• In communications, translate telephone technology is commonly used. This allow you to speak in English, while your Japanese friend hears you in Japanese, and vice-versa.
• Telephones are primarily wireless and include high resolution moving images.
• Heptic technologies are emerging. They allow people to touch and feel objects and other persons at a distance. These force-feedback devices are wildly used in games and in training simulation systems. Interactive games routinely include all encompassing all visual and auditory environments.
• The 1999 chat rooms have been replaced with virtual environments.
• At least half of all transactions are conducted online
• Intelligent routes are in use, primarily for long distance travel. Once your car’s computer’s guiding system locks on to the control sensors on one of these highways, you can sit back, and relax.
• There is a growing neo-luditte movement.

I think the reason these predictions fail, and many similar types of predictions I’ve made myself, is that we as intellectuals and optimists think other people work the same way we do. We make a faulty assumption that it just takes a little progress before people will catch on and see the benefits of a given type of progress–and that then they’ll take notice and give resources to accelerate the pace of advancement.

That’s fantasy.

Reality has within it an inherent friction to progress, and all optimists underestimate the resting inertial mass of “it’s how we’ve always done it”. And as much as we, as optimists and futurists, are able to logically accept this as a real obstacle, we still fail to take it into account when we give predictions about the future.

I feel rather silly for not being aware of this commonly-held opinion among economists, but evidently there’s quite a bit of consensus.

The argument seems to be that as wages go up more people will want those jobs, so the unskilled and young will suffer in the resulting competition for those positions.

But doesn’t that just increase unemployment among the unskilled, and not among the population in general? I mean, if you have x number of jobs, and they are going to be filled by that same number of people anyway (n), then what difference does it make for total unemployment numbers who fills them?

I guess the only explanation I could see would be employers consolidating multiple positions into fewer due to gains in productivity from higher-quality workers. But that doesn’t seem to be part of the argument.

Is anyone versed in this area enough to school me real quick?

This is seriously awesome. I’d give anything to see this kind of content today–especially in a mainstream venue. Unfortunately, our current population would never go for it.

(thanks to Steven Harms for the link)

I think if I were to have to guess, I would say that the reason we exist–or, to be more precise–the cause of our existence, is the creation by another life form for the purpose of experimentation.

This is not a new idea, but let me put my¹ particular spin on it.

When I say experimentation I don’t mean that in a crude way. I don’t mean like, “see if they kill each other.” I mean more like, “see what they create that we’ve never seen before.”

The idea is that for the creator of a universe only one thing would be interesting, and that is seeing something new. I don’t imagine this as tinkering at the earth-life level, e.g. dropping ingredients into the primordial soup. I see this more like adjustments to primary physical variables such as the strength of the strong and weak forces within atoms. Minute changes in these types of variables result not in different color plants on Earth, but rather different laws of physics, and thus different types of universes.

Again, the goal with creating entirely different sets of physical laws and different types of universes is just to get something interesting. The vast majority of everything will be boring, and there exists the possibility that if no randomness exists that everything is boring, but it’s hard to imagine a non-fantasy-based life form that has full perspective of a purely deterministic world, i.e. one that can see all outcomes of all particle interactions within a universe.

Mind-boggling.

Anyway, one thought here is that our existence is, by itself, extremely odd. This isn’t to say it’s unlikely given our physical laws or anything like that, but simply that it’s remarkable that we do exist in the first place. Not just remarkable–downright nutty.

What I think is far more unlikely than superior life forms creating us is the notion that we’ve just always been, and that we don’t require a cause. Sure, that leads back to the first-cause counter for who created our creators, but let’s take small steps.

My recent thoughts are that it’s not really that foolish to speculate on a possible origin of our existence, as long as you do so with a good amount of understanding regarding our limitations and biases when doing so. The primitive and dangerous path, of course, is to say, “Aha! You admit it’s strange that we’re here, and that it doesn’t make sense, and that we were most likely created by something. Well, I know who it was. He wrote this book.”

That last part is the problem. Going from “something probably made us” to “…and I know who it was” is not just a jump, it’s a teleportation of massive proportions into a wall of stupidity. The problem is that such specific beliefs have clear causes, and that those causes can be documented easily by science.

But returning to the point, it’s ok to think about possible theories for our existence, and I think the “search for newness” simulation theory is a good one. ::

¹ I say my knowing full well that this could be well traveled territory that I simply haven’t explored myself yet. Oh well; it is what it is.

I’ve been watching Arrested Development (damn them for cancelling it, by the way) recently and have been thinking about how so many good comedies are created by Jewish people. Curb Your Enthusisam, Seinfeld, etc. Too many to name.

Evidently there’s been an effort to convince people that Hollywood is not predominantly controlled by Jews. I guess I understand that given history’s treatment of the group; so maybe the idea is to stay off the radar to avoid some sort of backlash in the future. Fair enough.

But I hate when the truth is obscured for whatever reason–even (or especially) when the reason has something to do with a sensitive subject. So, yeah, I think it’s true. Jews are extremely influential in Hollywood. In fact, a recent Joel Stein piece in the Los Angeles Times says that all eight of Hollywood’s main film studios are run by Jews. He goes on to give these most excellent quotes:

How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish).

The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.

Again, so what? The real interesting thing here isn’t the fact that there are so many Jews in Hollywood; the interesting thing is that they’ve found some sort of algorithm for success (and not just in Hollywood, either). We should be spending less time talking about whether this is true and more time commending them and studying how they did it in order to replicate it. ::

Me in 87′ busting out with a handplant.

Ah, the days of Converse Allstars…

This is a truly inspired site design. So clean.

[ mezzoblue | mezzoblue.com ]

A notable blog. You’ll like it.

[ The iseen Blog | iseen.blogspot.com ]

I’ve added Google’s FriendConnect widget to the primary sidebar on the right (toward the bottom). I don’t have any particular fascination with its functionality as it stands today; I’m just curious about it.

If you happen upon it, and you’re not sold on the idea of Google being the anti-Christ’s ASP, give it a go. ::