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A lot of otherwise really smart people don’t believe that humans can be endlessly surprising. They leap from the (valid) observation that most humans are mostly predictable most of the time, especially in groups, to conclusion that human behavior is fundamentally unsurprising.
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All it takes is 1% of humans bding 1% surprising 1% of the time to make human behavior endlessly surprising at all scales. Imitation and entailment do the rest. Great Man Straussianism is a degenerate version of this. It conflates ability to surprise with intrinsic greatness.
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It doesn’t matter what scheme you use to pretend humans are unsurprising — race, class, whatever. Your theories might even be right most of the time if you look for the right kinds of confirmation. But it’s irrelevant because surprise shapes history, not predictability.
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There’s a Lump of Complexity fallacy underlying this failed frame. “There’s a fixed amount of complexity in the universe.” So if X turns out to be surprisingly complex you conclude not-X is simple.
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I haven’t done this much hands-on crap since freshman engineering in 93, and I noticed it makes you kinda stupid at higher levels of abstraction. The wealth of phenomenology at the log level tempts you into simplistic abstractions. I caught myself making up a manifesto earlier.
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Like Lump of Labor = “there’s a fixed amount of work in the economy” So if robots take some jobs there are fewer jobs for humans. Short-term half-true, long-term bullshit.
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Why liberal arts and not the narrower class of humanities? Because in practice in the US, “liberal arts” means one easy-A stats 101 class for “math” and a menu of easy no/low-math courses to meet science credit minimum. Serious math/science majors tend to identify as STEM.
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Replying to @vgr
why are stem and the liberal arts in opposite quadrants when math and science are integral to the liberal arts? trivium, quadrivium, etc.
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