john-lawrence-aspden
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Suppose that in the recent referendum, Scotland had voted to leave the UK. Does anyone think that the situation would have been more stable if England had attempted to keep Scotland by force?
To let subgroups defy this system of property and take possession of themselves and the land on which they reside would greatly destabilize the current world system.
Even speaking historically, this is not clear. The pre-twentieth century transition of the various territories of the British Empire to Dominion status stabilised the system greatly.
Essentially peaceful transitions from centrally controlled colony -> self-government for Canada, Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia and New Zealand, and the resulting states remained tightly allied.
The two places where dominion status wasn't given freely by the Empire, America and Ireland, were the two where there was "destabilization". If those two had been given their own governments peacefully when they demanded it, we might today be part of one vast friendly Commonwealth, and a large amount of unpleasantness might have been avoided.
And that in a world where everyone quite reasonably expected their neighbours to attack at any time, and splitting a state was seen as a disaster from a defensive point of view.
I have missed your clarity of mind Eliezer, it is very good to hear your voice again.
I'm not sure it would be a good thing for anyone if states and counties seceded into ever-smaller units and elected the usual run of even more nitwit governments, especially if it was only the democracies that started doing that.
I'm not sure of this either, but democracies don't seem to fight much, or even want to, and it's not clear that small countries are more prone to electing nitwits, so what are we worried about?
I'd be just as worried by the thought of the world's democracies unifying.
It seems to me that democracy is even more appalling
I highly recommend this book, but then it's currently my introduction to both Information Theory and Bayesian Statistics, and I haven't read any others to compare it to. I find it difficult to imagine a better one though.
Clear, logical, rigorous, readable, and lots of well chosen excellent exercises that illuminate the text.
The link is well worth following. Wow! Stereo vision with one eye closed!
I'll be there. Someone should make a sign with a paperclip on it, or at least have a laptop open and displaying one.
I believe this one is becoming traditional.
So, I was an undergrad mathematician, and planned to become an academic, but bailed out of my PhD and became a programmer instead. I made notes as I was reading the various articles.
My strong suit in maths was analysis. I just never 'got' algebra at all and didn't touch it after the first year.
Weirdly I was very good at linear algebra/matrices/spectral theory/fourier analysis. But all that seemed like a geometrical, intuitive theory about high-dimensional spaces to me. I had very strong reliable intuition there, but I never had any intuition, or idea about how one might go about acquiring one, for rings/fields/groups or mathematical logic.
I never liked any sort of symbol-manipulation.... (read more)