World War 3 and the Unknowability of Elon Musk’s Drug Habits | Hacker News Reader

World War 3 and the Unknowability of Elon Musk’s Drug Habits

deepsocks.substack.com

3 pointsbshepard7 comments

How much of Washington DC are "daily or more" cocaine users?

Seemed drug dependence was a good thing again; showing one's humility and community spirit and shit... Or is that just "prescription" drugs? I can't keep up.

you really think twitter has a chance to help make people smarter? like the parable of the scorpion of the frog lol, said the scorpion lmao

Good question. Here's the fable, retold by Wikipedia:

"A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge. It's in my nature.

Also, according to Wikipedia, "The earliest known appearance of this fable is in the 1933 Russian novel, The German Quarter by Lev Nitoburg"

1933 in Russia would be a good test case to see if the article's proposed method of 'probabilistic contextualization' could work - as there's broadly two different historical paradigms for understanding the great purges that began that year, on the one hand, the result of targeted assassinations within the USSR by fascist powers, or, on the other hand, as the result of Stalin's psychotic paranoia.

Could the probabilistic-contextualistic method bring some depolarization?

Is probabilistic contextual evidence another word for Bayesian inference?

Perhaps not, because you need to have a qualitative sense of context variation, and some contexts/fields of sense are not Bayesian in form - historical understand, for instance, depends on amassed narrative/empirical ...so that, for instance, my knowledge of progressive-era America depends on knowing a lot of facts and stories about different fields/metanarratives -- what Ann Douglas called the "feminization of American culture" --- the managerial revolution (burnham, Chandler), modern imperialism.

But it does involve fields of sense that are bayesian, and perhaps bayesian inference patterns will always obtain in any judgment?

Here's another way to consider the very deep question: bayesian inference applies to judgments of efficient causation, that is, a relationship between antecedents and consequents. This kind of judgement is very common, and very useful, but there are other kinds of judgement which may be needed to establish the likelihood of an event...specifically, what could be called "contextual judgement" For example, if we're trying to assess whether 9/11 was an inside job, we'd have to have to develop a sense of the context, specifically, the role of deep state false flags, and of secret societies within the ruling class culture of the United States.

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