On days with snow, activity to clear it continues through the night. It's 2am, and I just finished reading Fortune's Formula, I'm pretty excited by the ideas in the book, especially this dilemna over the acceptance of the Kelly Criterion that it has presented. I think I know how to resolve it - using something about ensembles, about the non-axiomaticity of risk adversity. It's exciting to have something difficult but tractable to chew on, especially when the reform of personal values is potentially at stake - I've always never been satisfied with the idea that risk adversity was something innate - and in-born risk adversity must have evolved, and I think that I can prove that risk adversity of that nature could only have emerged via the Kelly Criterion.

The book as a whole was an inspiring story showcasing the power of ideas, I think. That's its strongest appeal to me, at least.

This year I learnt that consistency is to be had in moderation. Consistency is an excess that plagues intelligent minds. I have come to believe that the true function of intelligence is rationalization, of which reasoning is an inevitable side effect. It is when the line of narrative becomes too powerful that clashes with the id become sustainable, and the resulting internal tension that causes much of the suffering we call the human condition.

Never again will I sacrifice happiness for consistency.

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p.s. thanks to Wen for bringing to my knowledge Robert Triver's comments on the evolution of self-deception. It really completed the picture.

Everyone gets where they are for different reasons. The enjoyment of games goes beyond winning. Life has a game-like aspect to it - one can fail and find it fair, or win and find it unfair. There is such a thing as too much humility. Excess humility retards learning. When too much to attributed to luck, not enough credit / blame is assigned to an action, and the causal truth takes longer to become clear.

People lie about luck with each other. People have personal convictions about what they/others deserved or not, causal reality as they see it. Those convictions are often impossible to communicate, because of how large the assumption base is. Yet we operate, because we do not start ab initio when thinking about things. When we do use logic, it is often done in an incremental, as opposed to the minimalist, manner. This is in stark constrast to the emphasis in formal education, where the right way is in general minimalist. The minimalist approach emphasizes objectivity and independence of components, and advocates that little things be made of big things. For the minimalist, the prime problems are those of rule discovery and complex deduction. As evidenced by all the researchers with low pay, these problems are not very susceptible to the parallelization algorithm we call money.

What do I mean by incremental logic? I mean the comparative approach that should be used when dealing with large complex systems. As an actor in a larger problem solver, it is sufficient impetus for action that one knows the action will improve the knowledge base, and to the extent a complete analysis can be avoided, it should be.