Second example of Aeon's Racism

Aeon, whose pick of authors is statistically racist, censors Blacks challenging Stupidity of an Epistemically worthless, Eugenicist, sort.

This is the comment they deleted- 

I am sorry to say that this is peurile nonsense on a par with Quantum Economics or Deepak Chopra’s bromides. It is ‘regret minimizing’- i.e. a rational response to Knightian Uncertainty- to take risks and shake things up a little. The Maths involves “Hannan Consistency’ and so forth and is as boring as Portfolio Choice theory. Consider the following school-girlish schwarmerie- ‘The algorithms took him to acrobatic-yoga classes in Mumbai and to a goat farm in Slovenia, but they also took him to the small-town pub of Holy Cross, Iowa, and to an eighth-grade flute recital, and to a small family Christmas in Fresno, California. Anywhere that would break him out of the comfortably predictable rut of the affluent San Franciscan tech worker.’ How did this deeply boring man become an ‘affluent San Fran tech worker’? The answer is by doing deeply boring things for unconscionably long intervals of time. No doubt, the fellow wants to escape his occupation before newer technology makes him redundant. So he spent some money on learning to write Malcolm Gladwell type shite. Good for him. But why should the rest of us care? If these authors were genuinely smart they would be very rich. We who read these articles are poor. We want to believe a PhD in some unlikely place- like Sussex (why not Roehampton, or Walthamslow- which has a combined Doctoral program in Zumba and Vovevodskian Univalent Foundations- or is bound to do so sometime soon?)- will avert recognition of something our species has been aware of for ten thousand years- viz. prediction is outsourced. There is a mimetic component. But non-mimetic initiatives are stochastic and doomed to fail. Our authors write- ‘The examined human life reflects, we suggest, a new kind of relationship with our own expectations and uncertainty.’ What’s new about Regret Minimization? If Evolution itself uses Hannan Consistent strategies and knowledge of Game theory- a la Aumann- is in the Old Testament or other Iron Age texts- then what ‘new relationship’ can these guys come up with? Tossing a coin like the ‘Diceman’? Puhleeze! The following sentence looks ‘Aeon’ or ‘Areo’ worthy. But is it really? ‘Yet it is one that we have somehow constructed within the inviolable bounds of a biologically bedrock drive to minimise long-term prediction error. How is this neat trick possible?’ If there is a ‘bedrock drive’ to minimize ‘surprise’ then NOTHING can be ‘constructed’ unless a priori synthetic judgments are true. We know they are not. So this is meaningless and in bad faith unless the authors believe in Occassionalism. Uncertainty is a mathematical concept. It is already well refined. The article these authors link to is jejune. There are some very smart people from the Life Sciences working in this area. But then, the roots of the concept have to do with shifting fitness landscapes. The authors appear wholly unaware of the ‘popular Science’ background of Moby Dick or the Diceman. This is a lazy type of collaborative writing in which lowest common denominator ‘wokeness’ is in the driving seat. Obviously, a well paid Techie in San Fran should spend time doing goat yoga in Soweto- and massacring Rohingyas in Myanmar- right? This is a case of negative synergy. Each of the three authors could have written better on their own. But they pooled their prejudices and paranoid ‘common knowledge’ to come up with something which really is NOT par for the course, or ought not to be, for Aeon. When I came to the West, I was the lowest type of ‘Black’- a ‘coolie’. But, back then, having a strong back meant that if you could be trusted with money when you were 12 and were doing at least half a ‘big man’s’ job by 15 then, by the age of 21- so long as you hadn’t got a girl pregnant- the world really was you oyster. I came from a privileged background and so never became rich but my rich ‘Black’ friends understand ‘Uncertainty’ in a visceral manner. But their kids take degrees and higher degrees at places we could not- coz good ‘coolies’ are good marriage partners and our race, regardless of color and class, HAS to perpetuate itself the way it always has. This involves FAITH. From Pascal’s Wager to Kavka’s Toxin- but also Kantorovich’s (Sobornost and pathetic) claim to have found the Labour (thus Christian!) theory of Value- great math mavens have puzzled their heads over things which three ordinary people made clear. (Gabriel) Tarde- Mimetics matter for Bayesian processes and Aumann correlated Mechanisms are what are (Thomas) Schelling focal to them. That’s just (Jonh) ‘Muth Rationality dude’ Actually, John Muth was a Math maven- but, apparently, he drank a lot of beer. So- hope for me yet!