Risk is probability times consequence. Focusing on the odds without considering the second half of the equation is stupid.

Scientists: invents commercial scale fusion Capitalist: hordes the almost free energy because why not? Poor people are only useful as a resource anyway.

Wait, what is the cheaper alternative to the moon landing?

Holy crap I feel old now. Since when? I’m still driving a car without a touch screen, and that’s never going to change.

I wonder how hard it would be to make an open source car brain that can be a drop-in replacement for the commercial ones?

Is it also a case of survivorship bias? Like, I am not super versed in Nazi history, but… There are famous “smart” Nazis like Goebbels and Himmler and Speer - are they only well known because a) they slowly emerged as influential and/or b) it became clear years later that they were the ones behind the wheel?

'Cause I do think that trump and musk are dumb as bricks, but I don’t think Steve Bannon is, and there are probably others like him…

Doom scrolling is facilitated by ad-optimised algorithms that push low-nuance, emotive content that gets a reaction, for views. (Thinking particularly of twitter and Facebook here)

The fediverse doesn’t have that, and has no reason to, because as soon as any provider starts pushing ads, people will switch servers. So I think it WILL stay that way.

Also, I think as a consequence of having less combatitive content up front, people are generally in a less heightened emotional state as a baseline, and are able to approach more nuanced content more thoughtfully.

I work in the risk assessment space, so they are kind of critical to be aware of, for me :)

Adding my own explanation, because I think it clicks better for me (especially when I write it down):

1. Pick a door. You have a 66% chance of picking a wrong door, and a 33% of picking the right door.
2. Monty excludes a door with 100% certainty
3. IF you picked a wrong door, then there’s a 100% chance the remaining door is correct (so the contingent probability is p(switch|picked wrong) = 100%), so the total chance of the remaining door being correct is p(switch|picked wrong)* p(picked wrong) = 66%.
4. IF you picked the right door, then Monty’s reveal gives you no new information, because both the other doors were wrong, so p(switch|picked right) = 50%, which means that p(switch|picked right) * p(picked right) = 50% * 33% = 17%.
5. p(don't switch|picked wrong) * p(picked wrong) = 50% * 66% = 33% (because of the remaining doors including the one you picked, you have no more information)
6. p(don't switch|picked right) * p(picked right) = 50% * 33% = 17% (because both of the unpicked doors are wrong, Monty didn’t give you more information)

So there’s a strong benefit of switching (66% to 33%) if you picked wrong, and even odds of switching if you picked right (17% in both cases).

Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.

Thanks for the help, it was easier this time 😅

Yep. Already true to a large extent. But it doesn’t take a majority of the world to make the fediverse work. We just need enough for it to become broadly attractive to a critical mass of people. It’s big enough to self-sustain now, so I think it’s just a matter of time until it hits that point.

It’s extremely useful, because it’s an index to all the known things that might be useful in a given situation. The point is not to assess all of them, the point is to not miss ones you’re unfamiliar with that may be important in your situation.

Good take. Bluesky is a good stop-gap.

I’ve also been thinking, if Bluesky never federates and enshittifies in a similar way to Twitter (which it will do much faster, just cause it’s a different era), then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…

What… are you talking about?

Bluesky has the network effect, at least for some domains of content. Mastodon has about 50% coverage of my domain of interests, but that’s probably way less for many people.

Mastodon has the guaranteed lack of enshittification via decentralisation. Bluesky is promising it, but it seems far from guaranteed, and if it doesn’t happen, I’m betting it’ll enshittify about 4 times faster than twitter, because everything does these days…

So Bluesky is probably a better bet in the short term for general users… I’m glad people are escaping twitter at least. But I’m sticking with Mastodon, 'cause fuck going through all that again in a couple of years.

Then a rapid decent into profit maximisation at the expense of user experience.

🫂

Yeah, that’s fair, for sure, to some degree. For instance large fractions of policing funding should be redirected into various social services, and military spending can get fuck off all together.

But also, wealthier people paying more than an equal share of tax is a good thing too, and provides lots of intangible benefits (e.g. better education systems and fewer people in extreme poverty and desperation leads to lower crime rates)

I think they probably appear in different types of situations, not all at once. And maybe different types of people/thinking are more prone to some than to others.

Really? The birthday problem is a super simple multiplication, you can do it on paper. The only thing you really need to understand is the inversion of probability (P(A) = 1 - P(not A)).

The Monty hall problem… I’ve understood it at times, but every time I come back to it I have to figure it out again, usually with help. That shit is unintuitive.