@Randem

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist who is making a big name for himself using game theory, a branch of applied mathematics, to make shockingly accurate predictions.

A Math Trek story in Science News tells the story of one such prediction:

One of his most famous past predictions also concerned Iran. In 1984, the model predicted that when Ayatollah Khomeini died, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khameini and a little-known cleric named Hasheimi Rafsanjani would rise to succeed Khomeini as leaders of Iran. At the time, most experts considered that outcome exceedingly unlikely, since Khomeini had designated a different person as his successor. But in fact, when Khomeini died five years later, Rafsanjani and Khameini succeeded him.

GOOD Magazine calls him The New Nostradamus:

The criticism rankles him, because, to his mind, the proof is right there on the page. “I’ve published a lot of forecasting papers over the years,” he says. “Papers that are about things that had not yet happened when the paper was published but would happen within some reasonable amount of time. There’s a track record that I can point to.” And indeed there is. Bueno de Mesquita has made a slew of uncannily accurate predictions—more than 2,000, on subjects ranging from the terrorist threat to America to the peace process in Northern Ireland—that would seem to prove him right.

This kind of thing really excites me. As a computer programmer and a mathematics buff, game theory really stokes my fire. I first learned about game theory while reading the The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins described how game theory could be used to reveal evolutionarily stable strategies — the real-world manifestation of natural selection.

Upon learning about game theory, I immediately recognized its potential predictive power. I was excited again recently, when a colleague emailed me a link to this essay by Rob Brown where he describes how he used a very simple implementation of game theory to create a movie recommendation system that was more accurate than that used by Netflix!

Yeah. Game theory is good stuff.

“Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.” -Napoleon Bonaparte

In the movie Brewster’s Millions, Montgomery Brewster (Richard Pryor) learns that he is to be the heir to an enormous fortune, but there’s a catch. He has 30 days to spend 30 million dollars. If he succeeds, he inherits 300 million, but if he fails, he has nothing. The hard part is that when the 30 days are over, he must have nothing to show for it. And he can’t donate to charity or simply give it away. Likewise, tips must not exceed the standard rate of 20%. In other words, the money must be spent, not thrown away.

I wonder what creative ways my readers can think of to spend a large amount of money in a short period of time, and have nothing to show for it.

Here are some ideas I came up with:

• Buy rare coins and use them in parking meters or gum ball machines
• Stay in expensive hotels and get room service
• Drink lots of fine wine
• Smoke expensive cigars
• Or fly into outer space

What do you think? Got any great, money-wasting ideas? Let me know!

The Council of Europe, a non-governmental body whose aim is to protect human rights, has adopted a resolution regarding the dangers of creationism in education.

You know it’s gonna be good when it starts like this:

Creationism in any of its forms, such as “intelligent design”, is not based on facts, does not use any scientific reasoning and its contents are definitely inappropriate for science classes.

Oh, if only my fellow Americans had as much common sense.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry thinks the human race is going to split into two distinct species — like in The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells — one attractive, intelligent, ruling elite, and the other an underclass of dim-witted, ugly, goblin-like creatures.

But then again, he also thinks that before that happens, we’ll all become a single coffee-colored species that mixes all the qualities of all the different races we currently know. I have a hard time with the first 1,000 years of Curry’s theory, but if you want to get into that, you can start by having a look at Ben Goldacre’s response to Curry, at Bad Science.

Believe it or not, the part in which I’m interested is the two species, H. G. Wells, sci-fi future of humanity. In fact, I think he’s right.

Background
First, I should explain that physical evolution has not stopped, but for humans it has taken a back seat. Biological evolution and natural selection require thousands of years for they newly evolved mutations to become prominent in the gene pool.

In contrast, psychological evolution and sexual selection shows it’s evidence much faster. Mate choice and sexual selection show immediate results after one generation, and can thus become rather widespread after only a few centuries.

Also, in a world where the environment changes so much from one generation to the next, natural selection is too slow to evolve changes for adaptation. That leaves sexual evolution in the driver’s seat, and that means the most attractive people will couple with equally attractive people, and unattractive people will be left to couple with equally unattractive people.

Evidence
The top half of today’s children are physically superior not only to others, but to history’s children of similar ages. Kids are developing at earlier ages. The beautiful people are getting more beautiful.

They’re also getting smarter. Today’s teenagers can operate the computers and program the VCRs and work the cell phones that drive their parents crazy. They’re better at spelling, better at math, better at music.

But the bottom half of today’s children are significantly inferior. Nearly 35 percent of American children ages 6 to 19 are overweight. Half of those—some 11 million children—are so overweight they’re classified as obese. They’re getting shorter, and fatter, and more unhealthy.

They’re intellectually inferior, too. Mark Morford at SF Gate writes:

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens’ decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words “agriculture,” or even “democracy.” Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he’s taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

So the smart, good-looking, physically fit people are getting smarter, better looking, taller, stronger. Meanwhile the fat, lazy, dumb people are getting fatter, lazier, sicker, shorter, and dumber.

Evolution
So indeed, I can see how the human race could easily be headed for a genetic split. After all, the smart, beautiful people don’t want to be with the dumb, fat people, right? Sexual selection will continue to lead the superior genes to mix, while leaving the inferior genes with no better options.

“The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know” -Napoleon Bonaparte

When in doubt, people look to the collective opinion for how to proceed. If a lot of people are wearing flip-flops and polo shirts, they’re in style and we feel more comfortable wearing them ourselves. If a beggar is asking for food on a busy downtown street, it’s likely we’ll ignore him if that’s what everyone else is doing. It’s called social proof.

There was a UFO cult here in Chicago in the ’60s. They believed the world would be destroyed in another great flood, but that 8 hours before it happened, a UFO would come by and pick up the cult members, taking them to safety. When they believed they were right, they did not accept new members. But after the big day came and went, with no flood and no UFO, they started actively recruiting new members. Why? Because they were looking for social proof.

And that’s kinda like what happens in relationships. You know… when you’re dating someone, and you have a fight, you turn to your friends and tell them your side — not because you want advice, but because you want their agreement, their social proof. (Social proof is even stronger when it comes from people we know.)

It’s even worse when people break up. It’s so easy to seek out all your friends and tell them horrible stories about the new ex-, not because it’s information they need… but because you want them to support the breakup. You want their social proof.

It’s perfectly natural, and largely unavoidable. Evolutionary psychologists will say it’s built into our genes. I think they’re right. It helps reduce the complexity of the number of decisions we have to make every day.

But in the end, we don’t respect groupthink. After all, trends are easy to folllow, but think about the people who start them. Don’t the majority of trends get started by the same minority of people? …a few independent people, who are strong-willed enough to do what they like, or what they want, or what they think is right, regardless of the logic of the crowd?

You can’t really blame people for following the groupthink. But you can’t exactly respect them, either.

If the whole crowd is walking past a homeless man, deliberately ignoring him, you will think nothing of walking past and ignoring him too. But if the street were completely empty, just you and him, and you had to walk past him, would you still be able to pretend you didn’t notice him asking for money? Or would you fish out some coins and try to help?

The problem with social proof is when it prevents us from doing the right thing, simply because nobody else is doing the right thing. And the evidence shows when we’re alone and our actions don’t match those from when we were in the group.

If you bad talk your ex- all day to your friends, and spend all day insisting you hate him, but then once you’re alone and away from your friends you call him and try to apologize, that makes you a hypocrite. It makes you inauthentic.

Don’t worry. It’s not so bad. You’re just like everyone else. Unfortunately, I’m looking for someone who stands out — who’s not just like everyone else. I don’t want just another hypocritical face in the crowd.

This is fun. Here are a sampling of recent search engine searches that have led people to Randem.net:

• can i slay them? and odor and how should they die
• where do peanuts come from
• where peanuts come from
• how to make an electric chair fun night
• a beer is better than a woman reasons
• new itunes 7.4.10
• rockafeller center christmas event
• the 50 funniest moments in child pornography
• keyword search shortcut google maps
• the new at&t complaints
• 52 reasons to have a beer over a woman
• punishment for desecration
• igoogle skins
• at&t dsl promotion/ complaints
• bible literal
• flickr feed igoogle
• roman excess
• daughter into slavery
• people who need to have the last word

In some cases, it troubles me what people are searching for online.  I have to assume that 50 funniest moment in child pornography is a joke, because it’s too disturbing to take seriously.  But why would someone be searching for “daughter into slavery”?

This is an awesome flyer for an awesome dog. It even has an awesome web site.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this dog had real, ultimate power, and occasionally flipped out and killed people… maybe with a roundhouse kick to the head!

No quarterback in NFL history has beaten 31 other teams. Granted that stat is only noteworthy as of the moment that there were 31 teams to beat, which would 1999, when the new Browns took the field.

Nevertheless, the bizarre part is that Brett Favre, Payton Manning, and Tom Brady have all beaten 30… and all three of them are playing their unbeaten opponent this week.

Will the three best quarterbacks in the game today all go into the history books for the same event on the same day?