Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"It is of the essence of merely habitual practices that one performance is a replica of its predecessors. It is of the essence of intelligent practices that one performance is modified by its predecessors." -- Gilbert Ryle, The concept of mind , p. 42

So I think some confusion has been generated in our ongoing discussion of "the hot hand" by the word "streaks." And a good bit of that confusion has been my fault, for including the word "streak" when what I really wanted to talk about was just "hotness" itself -- and here I'm thinking of you, Bob Murphy. Ha ha, just joking, I swear to you all that I never picture Bob and I showering naked together. Never ! For real. In any case, what I am indicating is the feeling that anyone who has played a sport or music, for any length of time, has had that they "on" at some moments, and not at others. And the TGV authors, besides trying to demonstrate that "hot hands" aren't predictively useful, also imply that the idea that "I am hot right now" is some sort of cognitive illusion. It seems that TGV may be incorrect on their predictive findings, but that's not what I have been addressing. I am asking "Doe...

Discrete mathematics , now under construction.

"that the social structure is corrupt and incomplete." -- Jordan Peterson Of course, we are obligated at all times to improve the social structure we find ourselves in as much as we can. But the problem with ideologues is that they think that simply because the current social structure is "corrupt and incomplete," that therefore they are justified in completely demolishing that existing structure. No, the new structure they establish will also be "corrupt and incomplete," and, per their logic, also require complete destruction. A "corrupt and incomplete" social structure is always preferable to no social structure.

Many times, people apply the term "narcissist" someone who thinks a lot of themselves. But clinically speaking, that is almost the complete opposite of what the term really means. Narcissists are, in fact, people who think so little of themselves that all of their actions are directed towards the maintenance of that extremely fragile self-image. So, for instance, if someone tells me Donald Trump is a narcissist, I know they have no idea what they are talking about. Trump may perhaps be an egomaniac, but he is absolutely not a narcissist.

A couple of readers confused about my post on definitions. If we change the sense of a turn, we may change its reference as well. (Not always: if we change the sense of X from "the evening star" to "the morning star," X still refers to the same thing!) But we have not changed any of the facts about what X used to refer to. So if we were to change the sense of the term "cat" to "a large, leaping Australian marsupial," it would henceforth refer to what we now call kangaroos. But that does not mean that the non-human mammal currently living in my house will suddenly have a pouch! Similarly, if we define a new mathematical symbolism, call it M new  , that is the same as ours (which we can call M old ) for the first use of number, but every subsequent time it is mentioned, its value goes up by one, so that in  M new , 2 + 2 = 5, since the second '2' means what '3' means in  M old . That 2 + 2 = 4 is always true in ordinary arithm...

I have observed that, when one writes a paper using one's own agent-based model, it is now common practice to perform statistical analysis of the output of the model. This is like hiding an Easter egg under a shrub so that your paper can "discover" it there in its conclusion.