Bayesian Investor Blog

An amusing parody: A Thinking Apes Critique of Trans-Simianism (HT Mark Atwood).

Book review: How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion by Daniel H. Wilson
This book combines good analyses of recent robotics research with an understanding of movie scenarios about robot intentions (”how could millions of dollars of special effects lead us astray?”) to produce advice of unknown value about how humans might deal with any malicious robots of the next decade or two.
It focuses mainly on what an ordinary individual or small groups can do to save themselves or postpone their demise, and says little about whether a major uprising can be prevented.
The book’s style is somewhat like the Daily Show’s style, mixing a good deal of accurate reporting with occasional bits of obvious satire (”Robots have no emotions. Sensing your fear could make a robot jealous”), but it doesn’t quite attain the Daily Show’s entertainment value.
Its analyses of the weaknesses of current robot sensors and intelligence should make it required reading for any science fiction author or movie producer who wants to appear realistic (I haven’t been paying enough attention to those fields recently to know whether such people still exist). But it needs a bit of common sense to be used properly. It’s all too easy to imagine a gullible movie producer following its advice to have humans build a time machine and escape to the Cretaceous without pondering whether the robots will use similar time machines to follow them.

I normally don’t repeat things that are reported on Marginal Revolution since I assume it would be redundant for most readers of my blog, but this story about the relative importance of sports and coups in Fiji is amusing enough that I can’t resist.

While checking out a possibly interesting hiking group, I stumbled on this amusing site: God Hates Figs.

Here’s a story about how a modern government might have protected baby Jesus.

I’ve been slowly working my way through a book by Richard Zacks called An Underground Education. I’ve found one section that deserves a blog entry of it’s own (I’ll discuss the rest of the book when I’ve finished reading it).
It describes a fairly popular betting-style market that ran from 1771 to 1776 in London about whether a diplomat named Chevalier D’Eon was male or female. D’Eon apparently acted and dressed at times as a man, and at other times as a woman, and refused to help the bettors settle their bets (even when D’Eon was offered a large amount of money to provide evidence of his/her sex). Eventually bettors got tired of waiting for an outcome and resorted to at least one lawsuit. The judge decided that D’Eon was a woman based on testimony from both sides of the lawsuit. Why did the side who had bet D’Eon was a man produce testimony that D’Eon was a woman? It was part of an accusation that the other side traded on what the SEC would call inside information. After D’Eon’s death, mortuary attendants said D’Eon was a man.
Aside from the obvious implications for how idea future style markets need to word claims so as to assure a practical means of observing whether a claim is true or not within a practical time period, this report also says some odd things about gender stereotyping. Lots of people probably think prior generations mostly had Victorian attitudes toward gender confusion, but it seems that D’Eon was sufficiently respectable in 1792 to have a dinner party thrown to honor both Thomas Paine and D’Eon.

Be sure to have any guests at your celebration of Isaac Newton’s birthday sign a Guest Liability and Indemnification Agreement (PDF) before you overfeed them.