Who Were the Sea Peoples?

As anyone reading this blog consistently knows, I do not "worship" Scott Adams, or anything of the sort. As soon as he starts to talk philosophy, he talks nonsense. But in understanding persuasion, he is a true pro. And in discussing the "pizza-gate" "scandal", he notes : "Here’s what I know that most of you do not: Confirmation bias looks EXACTLY LIKE a mountain of real evidence. And let me be super-clear here. When I say it looks exactly the same, I am not exaggerating. I mean there is no way to tell the difference." And of great importance here: Adams is de-bunking an anti-Clinton instance of confirmation bias. He doesn't just see confirmation bias when he wants to see it, and deny its possibility when he likes its implications. This is what is so hard to accept about what the "Godzilla" of influence, Robert Cialdini, describes in his book Pre-suasion . We are all susceptible to being primed, by pre-adopting a certain fr...

(A follow-up to this post .) Hegel's notion of the "concrete universal," later adopted by British idealists (like Bosanquet , Collingwood and Oakeshott) and Italian idealists (like Croce ), and important to a modern philosopher such as Claes Ryn , is difficult to grasp. We are used to thinking of the concrete and the universal as opposites of some sort. So what on earth is a "concrete universal"? This passage from R. G. Collingwood expresses the idea philosophically about as well as I have seen: "The concept is not something outside the world of sensuous experience: it is the very structure in order of that world itself... This is the point of view of concrete thought... Too abstract is to consider separately things that are inseparable: to think of the universal, for instance, without reflecting that it is merely the universal of its particulars, and to assume that one can isolate it in thought and to study it in this isolation. This assumption is a...

I let you know .

Now have their own page at GitHub.

   

I'm teaching algorithms from Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein , which is the current standard for advanced algorithm courses. I'm working now on coding up their rod-cutting algorithm. Supposedly we are solving a practical problem for a company, Serling Enterprises (Rod Serling pun), that buys long steel rods and wants to know how best to cut each rod to maximize revenues, given that different rod lengths sell at different prices. CLR&S offer an algorithm that determines the best cuts, and then... returns the maximum revenue possible, using those cuts. Can you imagine a manager at Serling actually using this code? She has a rod of 120 inches in length, and an list of prices for various rod lengths on the market. She feeds this items into the CLRS algorithm, and gets back the answer... $43. Say what?! The manager wants to know how she should cut the rod . Yes, it is nice to know, also, what revenue she will get from those optimal cuts. But an algorithm that retur...

I am regularly shown job listings by LinkedIn. Tonight I saw one for a quantitative researcher at the Sartre Group. I think this might be my kind of job: I picture sitting around on an open office floor with my colleagues, smoking Gauloises, sipping red wine, and asking "What is the point of quantitative research in a cold, indifferent universe?"