Good mistakes are very difficult to achieve, & the God complex - Best Ted Talks

Uploaded on 15 Jul 2011

http://www.ted.com Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.

Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics' biggest problems | Marcus du Sautoy | Science | guardian.co.uk

Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics' biggest problems | Marcus du Sautoy | Science | guardian.co.uk

A physicist has formulated a mathematical theory that purports to explain why the universe works the way it does – and it feels like 'the answer'

• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 May 2013 23.27 AEST

Eric Weinstein's theory is the first major challenge to the validity of Albert Einstein's Field Equations. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

 

Two years ago, a mathematician and physicist whom I've known for more than 20 years arranged to meet me in a bar in New York. What he was about to show me, he explained, were ideas that he'd been working on for the past two decades. As he took me through the equations he had been formulating I began to see emerging before my eyes potential answers for many of the major problems in physics. It was an extremely exciting, daring proposal, but also mathematically so natural that one could not but feel that it smelled right.

He has spent the past two years taking me through the ins and outs of his theory and that initial feeling that I was looking at "the answer" has not waned. On Thursday in Oxford he will begin to outline his ideas to the rest of the mathematics and physics community. If he is right, his name will be an easy one to remember: Eric Weinstein.

One of the things that particularly appeals to me about the theory is that symmetry, my own field of research, is a key ingredient. Of course the idea that the fundamental particles of nature are intimately connected to questions of symmetry is not new. But despite the great successes of the Standard Model there remain some very strange questions that have intrigued physicists for some years.

The particles described by the Standard Model – the stuff of nature that is revealed in accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider – fall into three "generations". In the first generation we see the electron, the electron neutrino, six quarks and their anti-particles, making 16 in total. But then rather bizarrely in the second generation we have another version of these particles which look exactly the same but are heavier than the first generation.

The heavier version of the electron is called the muon. The physicist Isadore Rabi famously quipped on hearing about the muon: "who ordered that?" It didn't seem to make sense that you should have a heavier version of all the particles in the first generation. What was the logic in that? To compound things, there is a third generation heavier again than the second whose electron partner is called the tau particle.

One of the challenges facing fundamental physics has been to provide a natural explanation for these three generations. Weinstein's theory does this by revealing the presence of a new geometric structure involving a much larger symmetry at work, inside which the symmetry of the Standard Model sits. What is so compelling about the geometry involving this larger symmetry group is that it explains why you get two copies of something with 16 particles but also that the third generation is something of an imposter. At high energies it will actually behave differently to the other two.

Not only that, it also predicts a slew of new particles that we can start looking for in our colliders. The particles in the Standard Model have a property called spin. The particles we see in the three generations we've seen to date all have spin 1/2. But Weinstein's symmetry is predicting that we will see new particles with spin 3/2 exhibiting familiar responses to the nongravitational forces together with a slew of new exotic particles with familiar spin but unfamiliar responses to the forces of the standard model.

The mark of a good theory is that it makes unexpected predictions that can be put to the test. If the predictions are incorrect you throw out the theory. Supersymmetry, for example – one of the current proposals for how to go beyond the physics of the Standard Model – is beginning to look shaky because we aren't seeing what the theory predicts we should see. It is interesting that, if Weinstein is correct, you would be hard-pushed to stumble on this stuff in the huge slew of data being generated by the LHC. You'd never find this from going from data to theory. Theory is needed to tell you where to look.

The geometry around the symmetry group that Weinstein is proposing also gives us an explanation of another of the big mysteries of physics: what dark matter is and why we can't see it. Our current theory of gravity predicts that there is a lot more matter in the universe than the stuff we can see. This hidden matter has been dubbed dark matter because none of the other forces of nature seem to interact with it.
When the symmetry in Weinstein's model breaks into pieces there is one half that gets separated in the mathematics from the piece we interact with. The particles corresponding to this bit of the symmetry-breaking might account for a piece that has an impact on gravity but mathematically can't interact with the other fields, such as electromagnetism, making it "dark".

The beautiful thing for me is that Weinstein's symmetry group doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It very naturally emerges from his primary goal, which is to reconcile Einstein's Field Equations with the Yang-Mills equations and the Dirac equation. The Field Equations control the curvature of space-time and represent our theory of gravity, whereas the Yang-Mills and Dirac equations represent our theory of particle interactions on a quantum level.

Both theories have been incredibly successful in describing the physical world, but they are not compatible with each other. The prevailing attempts to unify the two have been to try to "quantise geometry" – in other words move the geometry of Einstein into the quantum world. Weinstein's ideas run counter to this trend and are more in line with Einstein's belief in the power of mathematical geometry. Einstein talked about his belief that the universe was made of marble not wood. Weinstein's proposal, which he calls Geometric Unity, realises Einstein's dream.

Although a fan of Einstein, Weinstein's theory is also the first major challenge to the validity of Einstein's Field Equations. It requires some courage to challenge Einstein, but Weinstein's theory reveals that just as Newton's equations were an approximation to nature so too are Einstein's. One of the intriguing things to emerge from the mathematics that Weinstein weaves while combining these theories is a solution to one of the other enduring mysteries of physics: dark energy and the cosmological constant.

When Einstein produced his Field Equations it was believed that the universe was stationary – neither expanding nor contracting. To make his equations work he arbitrarily had to stick in an extra term called the cosmological constant to ensure the universe stood still. When it was later discovered that in fact the universe was expanding he removed the term and dubbed it "the biggest blunder of my life".
But more recently we have discovered that not only is the universe expanding, that expansion is accelerating, being pushed by some unknown source we have dubbed dark energy. One proposal for the source of this push involves reintroducing the cosmological constant into Einstein's Field Equations. But this cosmological constant has always seemed very arbitrary and a retrospective fix.
Weinstein's new perspective gives rise to equations that provide a coherent mathematical justification for why this extra term should be there. And contrary to what people have thought, it is not constant. Rather, it varies with the curvature of the universe. We are in a relatively flat piece of the universe, which explains why the cosmological constant is so small.

Another term that was added retrospectively to the Standard Model is the Higgs field. Without the Higgs mechanism, certain particles in the model would be massless. So this extra term is added to fix the fact that we know that particles like the W and Z particles that control the weak force do have mass. Again, one of the beautiful insights to emerge from Weinstein's unification programme is a mass term that doesn't need to be added artificially. It emerges naturally from the theory.

There have already been feelings within the physics community that the Higgs boson we are seeing in the LHC might not be quite what we think it is. Weinstein's perspective might help us articulate what it is we are actually seeing.

It has been a privilege to be one of the first to see the ideas that Weinstein is proposing. This is such a major project spanning huge stretches of mathematics and physics that it will take some time to realise the full implications of the ideas. And just as Einstein's general theory of relativity took some years to stabilise there are likely to be modifications to the theory before it is complete. But for me what is so appealing about Weinstein's ideas is the naturalness of the story, the way things aren't arbitrarily inserted to make the theory fit the data but instead emerge as a necessary part of the mathematics.
Weinstein begins the paper in which he explains his proposal with a quote from Einstein: "What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." Weinstein's theory answers this in spades. Very little in the universe is arbitrary. The mathematics explains why it should work the way it does. If this isn't a description of how our universe works then frankly I'd prefer to move to the universe where it does!

You can respond to Weinstein's new theory by leaving a comment under the accompanying blogpost by Alok Jha

Roll over Einstein: meet Weinstein | Science | guardian.co.uk

Roll over Einstein: meet Weinstein | Alok Jha | Science | guardian.co.uk

What are we to make of a man who left academia more than two decades ago but claims to have solved some of the most intractable problems in physics?

In Eric Weinstein's mathematical universe there is no missing dark matter. Photograph: AP

There are a lot of open questions in modern physics.

Most of the universe is missing, for example. The atoms we know about account for less than 5% of the mass of the observable universe - the rest is dark matter (around 25% of the mass of the universe) and dark energy (a whopping 70%). No one knows what either of these things actually is.

At the subatomic scale, we know there are three families of fundamental particles - called "generations" - and each one contains two quarks, a neutrino and a negatively charged particle (the lightest being the electron). But why are there three generations in the first place?

And the big one: why do the two pillars of 20th century physics, quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, not agree with each other?

Solving these problems, the last one in particular, has been the goal of many generations of scientists. A final theory of nature would have to explain all of the outstanding questions and, though many (including Albert Einstein himself) have tried, no one has come close to an answer.

At 4pm on Thursday at the University of Oxford, the latest attempt to fill the biggest holes in physics will be presented in a lecture at the prestigious Clarendon Laboratory. The man behind the ideas, Eric Weinstein, is not someone you might normally expect to be probing the very edge of theoretical physics. After a PhD in mathematical physics at Harvard University, he left academia more than two decades ago (via stints at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and is now an economist and consultant at the Natron Group, a New York hedge fund.
He may have an impressive CV, but Weinstein is in no way part of the academic physics community. He will speak in Oxford at the invitation of Marcus du Sautoy, one of the university's most famous and accomplished mathematicians who also holds Richard Dawkins's former academic position as the Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science. Weinstein and du Sautoy met as postdoctoral mathematics students at the Hebrew University in the 1990s.

Weinstein has been working on his ideas to unify physics for more than two decades, but he only shared them two years ago with du Sautoy, who since then has been keenly studying the mathematics. "I get so many letters and emails to me explaining big theories of the universe and I don't take them all so seriously," says du Sautoy. "Eric's been telling me the story of his ideas and what I immediately found appealing about them was the naturalness of them. You don't have to put in extraneous things. There's a beauty about it that gives you a feeling that there's a truth about it."

In Weinstein's theory, called Geometric Unity, he proposes a 14-dimensional "observerse" that has our familiar four-dimensional space-time continuum embedded within it. The interaction between the two is something like the relationship between the people in the stands and those on the pitch at a football stadium - the spectators (limited to their four-dimensional space) can see and are affected by the action on the pitch (representing all 14 dimensions) but are somewhat removed from it and cannot detect every detail.

In the mathematics of the observerse there is no missing dark matter. Weinstein explains that the mass only seems to be missing because of the "handedness" of our current understanding of the universe, the Standard Model of particle physics. This is the most complete mathematical description physicists have of the universe at the quantum level and describes 12 particles of matter (called fermions) and 12 force-carrying particles (called bosons), in addition to their antimatter partners.

"The Standard Model relies on a fundamental asymmetry between left-handedness and right-handedness in order to keep the observed particles very light in the mass scale of the universe," says Weinstein.

He says his theory does not have the asymmetry associated with the Standard Model. The reason we cannot easily detect the dark matter is that, in the observerse, when space is relatively flat, the left-handed and right-handed spaces would become disconnected and the two sides would not be aware of each other.

"Imagine a neurological patient whose left and right hand sides were not aware of each other," he says. "You'd have a situation where each side felt itself to be asymmetric, even though anyone looking at both halves together would see a symmetric individual whose left hand counterbalanced the right."
He proposes that dark energy is a type of fundamental force that could sit alongside gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces. This force pushes space apart and its strength is variable throughout the universe. Furthermore, Weinstein's theory predicts the existence of more than 150 new subatomic particles, most of them with exotic properties (such as electric charges that are greater than one, which is the maximum seen in nature at present).

Radical ideas that claim to solve all the problems of physics - so-called final theories of everything - have come and gone countless times in the history of physics and many are notable for emerging from outside the traditional world of university physics departments. In 2007, physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi made headlines when he claimed to have found a way to unify physics. Lisi's ideas never took off, because his theories did not make enough predictions that could be tested in experiments, the hallmark of a good scientific idea.

Weinstein has not shared his ideas too widely yet. Scientists who have seen some of the details similarly agree that there is some elegant mathematics in his 14-dimensional observerse. But it takes more than elegant mathematics to make a good scientific theory.

The current leading candidate to unify the fundamental forces of nature is M theory (also known as superstring theory), which proposes that all the particles we know of are actually, at the tiniest scale, vibrating loops of energy. Despite decades of effort from the cream of the theoretical physics community, however, M theory struggles to make any experimentally testable predictions.

David Kaplan, a particle theorist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has seen and discussed some of Weinstein's ideas with him. On the plus side, Kaplan says it is "phenomenal" that someone coming from outside academia could put together something so coherent. "There are many people who come from the outside with crazy theories, but they are not serious. Eric is serious."

But he says the theory is incomplete and should have spent more time being critiqued by academics before receiving any wider public attention. "What I would encourage him to do is modest things and take steps and commit to a physical manifestation of his theory – to say 'here is a set of instructions and a set of equations, do this calculation and you can make the following predictions.' And then see if his theory matches with the real world or not. He doesn't have enough of a case. What I'd like him to do is to keep working."

Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, has been discussing Weinstein's ideas with him for the past year. "I think that both mathematicians and physicists should take Eric's ideas very seriously," he says. "Even independently of their physical implications, I believe that Eric's insights will be useful to mathematicians, because he points to some structures which have not been studied before, as far as I know. As for the physical implications, it is quite possible that this new framework will lead to new answers to the big questions, after necessary work is done to make precise predictions which can be tested experimentally."

Jim al-Khalili, a nuclear physicist at the University of Surrey who has seen a summary of Weinstein's ideas (but not the maths) is sceptical. He says Weinstein will need to do a "heck of a lot of convincing" if he wants physicists to take his ideas seriously. "My main concern with Weinstein's claims is that they are simply too grand - too sweeping. It would be one thing if he argued for some modest prediction that his theory was making, and importantly one that could be tested experimentally, or that it explained a phenomenon or mechanism that other theories have failed to do, but he makes the mistake of claiming too much for it."

Until Weinstein produces a paper, physicists will remain unconvinced and, crucially, unable to properly assess the claims he is making. His lecture at Oxford today will give more mathematical details and Weinstein plans to put a manuscript on the Arxiv preprint server - a website where scientists often publish early drafts of their work, many of which subsequently get published in peer-reviewed journals.

Du Sautoy defends the unorthodox way that Weinstein's ideas have filtered into the world and expects corrections and updates to become apparent. "We live in an age where everything has to be sealed and delivered and complete when it's delivered and complete when it meets a journal and, in fact, that's not how science is done," he says.

Einstein's theory of general relativity, he added, was not a finished product when first presented, taking a decade of evolution and discussion to get into its final form.

"I'm trying to promote, perhaps, a new way of doing science. Let's start with really big ideas, let's be brave and let's have a discussion," says du Sautoy. "Science is very much an evolutionary process and [Weinstein's] is such a wide-ranging theory and involves such a wide area of mathematics and physics, this is an invitation to say, 'This is speculative and it's claiming a lot so let's see where it can go.'"
Whatever happens, says Frenkel, Weinstein is an example of how science might change in future. "I find it remarkable that Eric was able to come up with such beautiful and original ideas even though he has been out of academia for so long (doing wonderful things in other areas, such as economics and finance). In the past week we have learned about an outstanding result about prime numbers proved by a mathematician who had been virtually unknown, and now comes Eric's lecture at Oxford.

"I think this represents a new trend. It used to be that one had to be part of an academic hub, such as Harvard or Oxford, to produce cutting-edge research. But not any more. Part of the reason is the wide availability of scientific information on the internet. And I think this is a wonderful development, which should be supported.

"I also see two lessons coming from this. The first is for the young generation: with passion and perseverance there is no limit to what you can do, even in high-end theoretical science. The other lesson is for me and my colleagues in academia – and I say this as someone who on most days takes an elevator to his office in an Ivory Tower, as it were – we should be more inclusive and more open to ideas which come from outside the standard channels of academia, and we'll be better off for it."

Daniel Dennett - Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking | Video lecture

Published on 22 May 2013
 

Professor Dennett comes to Google to talk about his new book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Dennett deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built.

Alongside well-known favorites like Occam's Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett's own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser.

Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett's tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to "think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions."

About the Author: Daniel C. Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and the author of numerous books including Breaking the Spell, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Consciousness Explained.

Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking | Bamboo Innovator

May 26, 2013 Leave a comment

Daniel C. Dennett (Author)


Publication Date: May 6, 2013

One of the world’s leading philosophers offers aspiring thinkers his personal trove of mind-stretching thought experiments. Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun.

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful “imagination-extenders and focus-holders” meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built.

Alongside well-known favorites like Occam’s Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett’s own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett’s tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to “think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions.”

A sweeping work of intellectual seriousness that’s also studded with impish delights, Intuition Pumps offers intrepid thinkers—in all walks of life—delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers.Editorial Reviews

From Bookforum

Dennett declares that his aim in Intuition Pumps is to lay out devices by which we might think more clearly, or with more insight, about a host of thorny topics—which might be boiled down to those many areas in which we errantly or too hastily assume we have a solid sense of the right and wrong answers. The sheer number of these thought experiments, geared to reveal how thoroughly incorrect our assumptions might be, is daring itself. The most provocative comprise consciousness, free will, and our own sense of what we mean by meaning and intend by speaking of intentionality—in other words, the philosophical terrain Dennett has explored extensively in his prior books. —Eric Banks

Review

“Our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He’s redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.” (Marvin Minsky)

“One of the most original thinkers of our time.” (Michael Shermer - Science)

“The sharpest, cleverest, most stylish prober of how issues of human consciousness interconnect today with evolutionary theory.” (Carlin Romano - Philadelphia Inquirer)

“Once in a blue moon an analytic philosopher comes along who redeems his subdiscipline by combining professional persnicketiness with a romantic spirit, a vivid imagination, and a sense of humor…One of our most original and most readable philosophers.” (Richard Rorty)

Daniel Dennett "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking" - Video and audio

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - Video and audio - News and media - Home

Download: Audio
Speaker(s): Professor Daniel Dennett



Chair: Professor Christian List

Recorded on 23 May 2013 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.
In this lecture, one of the world's most original thinkers will show how he designs, uses, and dismantles the thinking tools that have illuminated his theories of meaning, mind, and evolution. The big difference between human minds and the minds of other animals is our equipping ourselves with literally hundreds of thinking tools--cultural software that we install in our brains much the way we download Java applets to our laptops and smart phones. Some of these tools are as simple as labels or metaphors, and others are sophisticated intuition pumps--persuasion-machines that can delude us if we're not careful.

Daniel Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Christian List is professor of political science and philosophy at LSE.
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Difference Between Epistemological and Instrumental Rationality | 60 Second Reads | Big Think

The Difference Between Epistemological and Instrumental Rationality | 60 Second Reads | Big Think

by Jaan Tallinn

May 19, 2013, 1:00 PM

When I talk about rationality I mean really two things.  One is so-called epistemological rationality, which is caring about truth, caring about being right and following that processes called truth seeking process meaning that you just don’t—you are not curious and engaged in discussions, not just in order to be interesting, but actually find out what is true in this world.

That is epistemological rationality.  And the other thing is instrumental rationality. Instrumental rationality is caring about winning, so it’s like you take actions that will, with high probability, lead you towards you goals and it’s really interesting that there seems to be kind of reverse correlation between people who care about instrumental rationality, basically being successful and people who care about epistemological rationality like knowing things about the world and

I'm really curious.  Why is that so?  And this is something that really could change the world if you would have more people that A, would care about truth, but would not only get stuck in their process of finding truth, but would also apply their knowledge and rationality towards steering the future towards better outcomes.

What does seeking eudaimonia mean? | Seeking Eudaimonia

What does seeking eudaimonia mean? | Seeking Eudaimonia

the journey to flourishing

• The Climber’s Wife
• What does seeking eudaimonia mean?
• About me

What does seeking eudaimonia mean?

‘Eudaimonia‘ may be considered or translated from the ancient Greek as ‘human flourishing’. It was one of several concepts, along with virtue (aretê) and the soul, that shaped the moral theories of the ancient philosophers.

For me, the eudaimonistic doctrine of Epicurius is persuasive. The idea is that the aim of life is the body’s health and the soul’s tranquillity (ataraxia) and that therefore pleasure (the absence of bodily pain and mental distress) is the beginning and end of the blessed life. Human flourishing then, depends on pleasure.

Epicurian pleasure isn’t out-and-out hedonism though. The privileging of ataraxia means that the Epicurian will seek simple pleasures (that promote the absence of bodily pain and mental distress). Depending on what you ‘count’ as pain and distress (for example, is being a bit hungry, pain? or just really really hungry?) I generally think that a wider palate of pleasures than those that are strictly Epicurian are necessary to really achieve the body’s health and the soul’s tranquility and thus human flourishing.

This blog is a place to mull over the big and the little questions to do with the seeking of eudaimonia. What is the key to pleasure? What is happiness? What is love? Can there be a positive purpose to conflict or pain? Must we seek to shape society to reflect or enhance certain values or activities? What does a good friendship look like? Should you call your mum on Sunday afternoons? Do you really need to get out of bed everyday?

Thomas Paine - English-American political activist, author, political theorist and revolutionary.

Thomas Paine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Religious views

Before his arrest and imprisonment in France, knowing that he would probably be arrested and executed, Paine, following in the tradition of early eighteenth-century British deism, wrote the first part of The Age of Reason, an assault on organized "revealed" religion combining a compilation of the many inconsistencies he found in the Bible with his own advocacy of deism, and calling for "free rational inquiry" into all subjects, especially religion.

About his own religious beliefs, Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of.

My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Though there is no evidence he was himself a Freemason,^[66] upon his return to America from France, Paine also penned "An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry" (1803–1805), about Freemasonry being derived from the religion of the ancient Druids.^[67]

In the essay, he stated that "The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally paid to the sun." Marguerite de Bonneville published the essay in 1810, after Paine's death, but she chose to omit certain passages from it that were critical of Christianity, most of which were restored in an 1818 printing.^[68]

While never describing himself as a deist,^[69] Paine wrote:

How different is [Christianity] to the pure and simple profession of Deism! The true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical.

And again, in The Age of Reason:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

About the Quaker religion, he wrote in The Age of Reason:

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers ... though I revere their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at [their] conceit; ... if the taste of a Quaker [had] been consulted at the Creation, what a silent and drab-colored Creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.

In the second part of The Age of Reason, about his sickness in prison, he wrote: "... I was seized with a fever, that, in its progress, had every symptom of becoming mortal, and from the effects of which I am not recovered. It was then that I remembered, with renewed satisfaction, and congratulated myself most sincerely, on having written the former part of 'The Age of Reason'". This quotation encapsulates its gist:

The opinions I have advanced ... are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation, by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues – and that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter. So say I now – and so help me God.

In December 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), his book that advocates deism, promotes reason and freethinking, and argues against institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular.

He pioneered a style of political writing suited to the democratic society he envisioned, with Common Sense serving as a primary example. Part of Paine's work was to render complex ideas intelligible to average readers of the day, with clear, concise writing unlike the formal, learned style favored by many of Paine's contemporaries.^[24] Scholars have put forward various explanations to account for its success, including the historic moment, Paine's easy-to-understand style, his democratic ethos, and his use of psychology and ideology.^[25]

He also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income. In 1802, he returned to America where he died on June 8, 1809.

Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity.^[6]

Thomas Paine

Oil painting by Auguste Millière (1880)
Born	January 29, 1737[1] Thetford, Norfolk, Great Britain
Died	June 8, 1809 (aged 72) New York City, New York, U.S.
Era	18th-century philosophy
Religion	Deism
School	Enlightenment, Liberalism, Radicalism, Republicanism
Main interests	Politics, ethics, religion
Influenced by[show]
Influenced[show]
Signature

Contents

• 1 Early life
• 2 American Revolution
  • 2.1 Common Sense (1776)
  • 2.2 The American Crisis (1776)
  • 2.3 Foreign Affairs
  • 2.4 Funding the Revolution
• 3 Rights of Man
• 4 The Age of Reason
  • 4.1 Attack on George Washington
• 5 Later years
• 6 Death
• 7 Ideas
  • 7.1 Slavery
  • 7.2 Agrarian Justice
• 8 Religious views
• 9 Legacy
  • 9.1 Lincoln
  • 9.2 Edison
  • 9.3 South America
  • 9.4 Memorials
  • 9.5 In popular culture
• 10 See also
• 11 References
• 12 External links

American newspapers reprinted the obituary notice from the New York Citizen,^[55] which read in part: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." Only six mourners came to his funeral, two of whom were black, most likely freedmen. The writer and orator Robert G. Ingersoll wrote:

Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of life. One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul. He was a victim of the people, but his convictions remained unshaken. He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently waiting for his death. Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their hearts. On the 8th of June, 1809, death came – Death, almost his only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display. In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine.^[56]

In December 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), his book that advocates deism, promotes reason and freethinking, and argues against institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular.

He pioneered a style of political writing suited to the democratic society he envisioned, with Common Sense serving as a primary example. Part of Paine's work was to render complex ideas intelligible to average readers of the day, with clear, concise writing unlike the formal, learned style favored by many of Paine's contemporaries.^[24] Scholars have put forward various explanations to account for its success, including the historic moment, Paine's easy-to-understand style, his democratic ethos, and his use of psychology and ideology.^[25]

He also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income. In 1802, he returned to America where he died on June 8, 1809.

Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity.^[6]

Thomas Paine

Oil painting by Auguste Millière (1880)
Born	January 29, 1737[1] Thetford, Norfolk, Great Britain
Died	June 8, 1809 (aged 72) New York City, New York, U.S.
Era	18th-century philosophy
Religion	Deism
School	Enlightenment, Liberalism, Radicalism, Republicanism
Main interests	Politics, ethics, religion
Influenced by[show]
Influenced[show]
Signature

Contents

• 1 Early life
• 2 American Revolution
  • 2.1 Common Sense (1776)
  • 2.2 The American Crisis (1776)
  • 2.3 Foreign Affairs
  • 2.4 Funding the Revolution
• 3 Rights of Man
• 4 The Age of Reason
  • 4.1 Attack on George Washington
• 5 Later years
• 6 Death
• 7 Ideas
  • 7.1 Slavery
  • 7.2 Agrarian Justice
• 8 Religious views
• 9 Legacy
  • 9.1 Lincoln
  • 9.2 Edison
  • 9.3 South America
  • 9.4 Memorials
  • 9.5 In popular culture
• 10 See also
• 11 References
• 12 External links

American newspapers reprinted the obituary notice from the New York Citizen,^[55] which read in part: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." Only six mourners came to his funeral, two of whom were black, most likely freedmen. The writer and orator Robert G. Ingersoll wrote:

Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of life. One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul. He was a victim of the people, but his convictions remained unshaken. He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently waiting for his death. Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their hearts. On the 8th of June, 1809, death came – Death, almost his only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display. In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine.^[56]

Denis Diderot - Wikipedia

Denis Diderot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diderot, by Louis-Michel van Loo, 1767.
Born	5 October 1713 Langres, France
Died	31 July 1784 (aged 70) Paris, France
Era	18th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
Influenced[show]
Signature

Philosophy

As a philosopher Diderot speculated on free will and held a completely materialistic view of the universe; he suggested all human behavior is determined by heredity. He therefore warned his fellow philosophers against an overemphasis on mathematics and against the blind optimism that sees in the growth of physical knowledge an automatic social and human progress. He rejected the Idea of Progress. In his opinion, the aim of progressing through technology was doomed to fail. He founded his philosophy on experiment and the study of probabilities. He wrote several articles and supplements concerning gambling, mortality rates, and inoculation against smallpox for the Encyclopédie. There he discreetly but firmly refuted d'Alembert's technical errors and personal positions on probability.
In his youth Diderot was originally a follower of Voltaire and his deist Anglomanie, but gradually moved away from this line of thought towards materialism and atheism, a move which was finally realised in 1747 in the philosophical debate in the second part of his La Promenade du sceptique (1747).^[12]

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Denis Diderot

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Denis Diderot

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Denis Diderot

• Diderot Search engine in French for human sciences in tribute to Diderot
• Denis Diderot article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Works by Denis Diderot at Project Gutenberg (French)
• Denis Diderot: Rêve d'Alembert (d'Alembert's Dream) (French and English texts)
• Conversation between D'Alembert and Diderot (alternate translation of the first part of the above)
• Denis Diderot Archive (English)
• Works by or about Denis Diderot in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Diderot's listing at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (French)
• Denis Diderot Website (in French)
• The Project Gutenberg eBook of Diderot by John Morley
• (French) On line version of the Encyclopédie. The articles are classified in alphabetical order (26 files).
• The ARTFL Encyclopédie, provided by the ARTFL Project of the University of Chicago (articles in French, scans of 18th century print copies provided)
• The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, product of the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library (an effort to translate the Encyclopédie into English)
• Denis Diderot,“État de la Chine selon ses détracteurs,” 1781.
• Short biography
• Denis Diderot Bibliography
• Le Neveu de Rameau – Diderot et Goethe

The Romantics - Nature (BBC documentary) - YouTube

Published on 29 Dec 2012

What The French Revolution has to do with the love of nature and the birth of the modern individual.

The great philosopher and writer Jean-Jaques Rousseau was born 299 years ago today. His work sparked a new dawn of hope for liberty and equality, ultimately fueling one of the greatest sociopolitical upheavals in the history of our civilization — The French Revolution — and, eventually, the American Revolution.

These “Romantic” ideas permeated nearly every facet of culture, from art to politics, and the legacy of his seminal novel, Émile: or, On Education underpins many of the concepts in these 7 must-read books on education.

To celebrate Rousseau’s birthday, here is a fantastic 2005 BBC documentary titled The Romantics, exploring the birth of the individual in modern society. Each of the program’s three parts examines one key aspect of the Romanticism movement. Liberty looks at how Rousseau and his contemporaries, including Denis Diderot, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, challenged the authority of Church and King to rein in a new era of self-empowerment.

Byron, Keats and Shelley lived short lives, but the radical way they lived them would change the world. At 19, Shelley wrote The Necessity of Atheism - it was banned and burned, but it freed the Romantics from religion. Through their search for meaning in a world without God, they pioneered the notions of free love, celebrity and secular idolatry that are at the centre of modern Western culture.

For them poetry became the new religion, a way of reaching eternity. Their words are brought to life by Nicholas Shaw, Blake Ritson and Joseph Millson.

Nassim Taleb's 'Antifragile' Celebrates Randomness In People, Markets - Forbes

Nassim Taleb's 'Antifragile' Celebrates Randomness In People, Markets - Forbes

Charles Sizemore, Contributor

Author Nassim Taleb

We all know what “fragile” means.  But what is the opposite of fragile?



If you are like me, your instinctive response would be “robust” or perhaps “durable.”  But you would be wrong.

Something that is fragile is damaged by an unexpected shock, whereas something that is robust or durable is able to withstand it.  To be robust is to be neutral to shocks.

But what do you call the true opposite of fragile—something that actually benefits from shocks?
As Nassim Taleb points out, there is no word in English (or in any other language, ancient or modern) that conveys this idea.  So he invented one—antifragile—and wrote an entertaining and enlightening book around the concept.

Taleb is at times playful and even self-effacing in his writing and at other times insufferably arrogant (“non-meek” in his words).  But he is always—and I mean always—thought provoking.

Years ago, before Taleb become something of a celebrity, I picked up his original Fooled by Randomness and had something of a “eureka” moment.  Taleb put into words (and numbers) many of the abstract ideas about risk and randomness that I instinctively felt yet couldn’t articulate (he had that effect on a lot of people, it would turn out).  In particular, I had always mistrusted the Value-at-Risk metric and its offshoots that had been crammed down my throat as an undergraduate finance student.  It registered on my “bulls**t detector”, to borrow one of Taleb’s earthy phrases, and history would vindicate this gut reflex with implosion of the financial system in 2008.

I still consider Fooled to be his best book, and if you have never read Taleb’s work that is where I would recommend you start.  But Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder expands on the concepts in Fooled and its follow-up The Black Swan and goes far beyond financial markets into a more general theory of randomness and volatility and their importance in life and nature.  “Living things are long volatility,” he emphasizes often.

Perhaps Taleb’s greatest gift as a writer is his ability to speak in metaphors, the best of which is his analogy of the Procrustean Bed (see my review of Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes).

Procrustes was a nasty little fellow from Greek mythology who would invite guests into his home and then either stretch or amputate parts of their legs to make them fit just right in his guest bed.  In Taleb’s analogy, much of the modern world is a Procrustean bed of sorts.  People, markets and economic systems are contorted to fit tidy theories.

But in Antifragile, Taleb goes beyond this “square peg in a round hole” argument to a larger critique of “soccer moms” (both figurative and literal) who naively attempt to make the world safer by “sucking randomness out to the last drop.”  Doing this provides the illusion of safety while actually making us less resilient and more fragile.  In other words, not only are scraped knees and bruises ok, they are an essential part of growth.

Many readers misunderstand Taleb’s core message.  They assume that because Taleb writes about unseen and improperly calculated risks, his objective must be to reduce or eliminate risk.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  

If anything, Antifragile is a celebration of risk and randomness and a call to arms to recognize and embrace antifragility.  Rather than reduce risk, organize your life, your business or your society in such a way that it benefits from randomness and the occasional Black Swan event.

Taleb’s own life is a case in point.  He had the free time to write Fooled, The Black Swan and Antifragile because—in his own words—he made “F___ you money” during the greatest Black Swan event of our lifetimes, the 1987 stock market crash.   And to demonstrate that Taleb’s trading style is antifragile, had the 1987 crash never happened, Taleb would not have been materially hurt.  His trading style puts little at risk but allows for outsized returns.

In what may seem somewhat disturbing to some readers (and Taleb himself is disturbed by it as well), what makes a system antifragile is that its individual pieces are perishable.  Natural selection—the survival of the fittest—requires that the unfit are allowed to fail.

Using the example of restaurants, the restaurant sector is robust because the failure of any one restaurant does not affect the others.  And the restaurant sector is antifragile because the remaining players actually learn and grow from witnessing the mistakes made by the failed restaurant.

Now, compare this to the banking system.  The world banking system is inherently fragile because the failure of one bank leads to contagion that can cause the failure of other banks and of the system itself.
The importance of failure to an antifragile system is a recurring theme to the book.  As individuals and as a collective, we learn more from mistakes than from successes.  In a capitalist system, you need a replenishable  supply of entrepreneurs willing to take risks.  For every failed business idea, our knowledge base expands.

Taleb goes so far as to advocate we treat ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, “perhaps not with as much honor, but using the same logic.”

As Taleb explains, just as “there is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner), likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur  or failed scientific researcher.”   Their sacrifice makes the system stronger.

I commend Taleb on another book well written, and I recommend Antifragile along with Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

Black swan theory - Wikipedia

Black swan theory - Wikipedia

A black swan, a member of the species Cygnus atratus

The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that is a surprise (to the observer), has a major effect, and after the fact is often inappropriately rationalized with the benefit of hindsight.

The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:

1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology
2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities)
3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs

Unlike the earlier philosophical "black swan problem," the "black swan theory" refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.^[1]

Contents

• 1 Background
• 2 Identifying a black swan event
• 3 Coping with black swan events
• 4 Epistemological approach
• 5 See also
  • 5.1 Books by Taleb
• 6 References
• 7 External links
  

The phrase "black swan" derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal's characterization of something being "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ("a rare bird in the lands, very much like a black swan") (6.165).^[3] In English, when the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the simile lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the phrase's underlying logic, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.

Juvenal's phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.^[4] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,^[5] the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.^[6]
Specifically, Taleb asserts^[7] in the New York Times:

"What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme 'impact'. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

"I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme 'impact', and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives."

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The Black Swan (Taleb book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a literary/philosophical book by the epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book focuses on the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (outliers) and humans' tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively. This theory has since become known as the black swan theory.

The book also covers subjects relating to knowledge, aesthetics, and ways of life, and uses elements of fiction in making its points.

The first edition appeared in 2007 and was a commercial success. It spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.^[1] The second, expanded edition appeared in 2010.

Contents 1 Overview: Black Swan theory 2 Sales 3 Coping with black swan events 4 Summary 4.1 Part one: Umberto Eco's anti-library, or how we seek validation 5 Arguments 5.1 Higher frequency 5.2 The huge effect 5.3 Limits of human knowledge 5.4 Not all experts deserve the title 5.5 The narrative fallacy 6 Praise and criticism 6.1 Style 6.2 Praise 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 10 External links