“The great value of the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm is the way it helps us understand how what once was "noise" (e.g., unselected-uncorrelated variation) can become new "signal" under changing circumstances.”
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“Mechanism design takes up Hume's challenge by designing games in which the knaves to whom power is delegated are treated as players. The checks in the constitution are the rules of the game. These are used to prevent a player going off the rails in situations that the designer can effectively monitor and evaluate. However, it is the controls that are more important, since these apply to decisions that the designer can't monitor, or doesn't know how to evaluate. To get the players to act in accordance with the designer's aims rather than their own in such situations, it is necessary that the payoffs of the game be carefully chosen to provide the right incentives.”
― Natural Justice
― Natural Justice
“Representation is a process of informational triangulation. Its aim is the specification of distal stimuli. It achieves that aim by corralling the output of multiple information channels integrated at their point of confluence. The integration process, in short, disambiguates individual information channels via the mutual constraints each channel provides others. The specificity won thereby falls on a continuum from the highly unspecific (simple transducers, little integrative depth) to the highly specific (subtle transducers, manifold integration).”
― Simple Minds
― Simple Minds
“Principles of choice, or “personal rules,” represent self-enforcing contracts with your future motivational states; such contracts depend on your seeing each current choice as a precedent that predicts how you’re apt to choose among similar options in the future. Short-range interests evade personal rules by proposing exceptions that might keep the present case from setting a precedent. The will is a recursive process that bets the expected value of your future self-control against each of your successive temptations.”
― Breakdown of Will
― Breakdown of Will
“[O]ur brains try to predict the patterns that serve our needs and that fit our action repertoires. This may well result in the use of simple models whose power resides precisely in their failing to encode every detail and nuance present in the sensory array. This is not a barrier to true contact with the world - rather, it's a prerequisite for it. For knowing the world, in the only sense that can matter to an evolved organism, means being able to act in that world: being able to respond quickly and efficiently to salient environmental opportunities.”
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Hélio’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Hélio’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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