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I think at this point, when it comes to people w money, very few aren’t or can’t be corrupted. It just depends on the amount it takes to own them. That makes me take a greater than skeptical view.

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This is another reason that a localism movement is in order. Trust circles are a technology that need reconfiguring. People don't sell out those they truly love for any reason, and if they love nobody, they're broken. I suspect that connection to community makes it harder to impossible to corrupt people.

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Hi Mathew,

A long time fan of Robert Pirsig's opus here, I just bought a Kindle version of your first book in anticipation.

But the reason I'm jumping in here is to plug for Dunbar's number as a rough proxy for neurological constraints on empathy. Those constraints on scaling (and the moral implications for populations larger than small communities), and dark-triad behavior traits, seem to be the most salient variables in our sustainability as a species ... social primates? Or perhaps nature's first, only, and last experiment with 'herding primates'?

Dunno.

And it keeps me awake at nights.

Cheers from Japan. — steve

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022Author

Steve,

I hope this doesn't disappoint you, but you've confused me with Matthew B. Crawford. I am Mathew B. Crawford, and sadly I can't help you fix your motorcycle.

I enjoy his books, too. My first book (co-author) is one that I can't legally mention. And that still irritates me. But my first math book was on Number Theory, which is where I found a bit of zen.

However, I'm in complete agreement about Dunbar's Number.

https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/parasocial-dunbar-hacking

I do think that we can build trustworthy civilization in "Dunbar rings/circles" as I call them, but that we'll need to restructure in a way that prevents overcentralization of power.

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LOL ...

That's what I get for being 'Steve Martin'.

Would rather be 'Bill Murray', but will take what I can get.

Just settling down for dinner, but looking forward to that parasocial substack link.

I guess if I had to label myself, it would be 'pro-social anarchist' ... just enough moral maturity and autonomy to feel obliged (not compelled top-down) to empower the marginalized and hold authority accountable. The kind of stuff that will get you booted from a tenured position in a Japanese college 🥳. Meh ... beats suicide.

Thanks for the link, and sorry for the mix-up.

Enjoying and learning a lot from your substacks thus far.

Just posted my first, but will circle around that thing like a buzzard, polishing for my one subscriber. 😂

Cheers from Japan!

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022Author

But Steve Martin played the banjo like a beast.

I've taken a picture with one of his banjos.

Cheers.

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LOL. Indeed.

This one plays nylon string and sings bossa nova in Portuguese.

But not worth a dime.

Cheers Mathew with the single 'tea'. 🙃

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Hearing a performance of his (he had at that time recently written a song that, IIRC, was supposed to be evocative of watching his dog run) inspired me to want to take up the banjo.

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Aug 3, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Bayesian analysis won't obsolete the ancient advice, "follow the money."

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I just took a look because Steve mentioned it in a recently post. Another problem I see with it is the vague definition of the questions themselves. The question about the 2020 election for example uses specific terms like "widespread fraud" and breaks down only a few specific conclusions that really don't cover the possibilities. Are centralized and distributed mutually exclusive? The reality appears much more complex. IMO the number of red flags in that election, and the careful avoidance of courts accepting cases to evaluate the evidence, points to serious problems that throw the results in doubt. Like covid, the press studiously refused to investigate, leaving a rag tag army of bloggers to pick up the pieces.

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022Author

"Steve mentioned it in a recently post"

I missed that one, but not surprised that Steve has seen it, too.

At this point, I think that governments have been unified in a war against truth. Any signaling we can make work faithfully is a victory.

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This is super cool. Now I have another reason to not sleep tonight! I can’t stop thinking about this concept. Thank you- this is my intro to it. 🙏🇨🇦🙏

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It's definitely worth thinking about. Predictions markets have always maintained interesting singaling potential. It may be that it's easier to run some markets anonymously, and some locally, or simply to accept and try to recognize the degree to which these sorts of markets can be manipulated, and under what conditions.

It definitely still has problems.

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Aug 3, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

a downside is they *can* be corruptible or gameable in correlation to size

See Aussie syndicate buy all the numbers in 1992 Virginia Lottery

https://funfactz.com/amazing-facts/australian-gambling-syndicate-lottery-heist/

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022

Steve has already been in touch with Saar, and has mentioned RootClaim in his latest articles.

Saar follows (and comments) on Steve's substack.

> It shows how many analyses are biased, bias is one of the main reasons for poor analyses.

I believe this is the crux.

There are many different biases and they take different forms. Political bias is the most obvious, but there are many others.

We can't ask people to divulge their biases because we are often blind to our own.

3rd party groups need to tease out and rank these biases independently, and use them to build a Bayesian framework, very much the same as RootClaim does to rank evidences.

We just need one to rank biases.

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I looked through their current challenges and agree with all of them except the 2020 election results.

What I find even more surprising is the fact that Saar most likely agrees with Steve's bets, otherwise he would have challenged him.

If the whole COVID response has taught us anything, it is how corrupt even complicit the media and government agencies are at pushing the vaccine mandates and hiding vaccine injuries.

None of this is accounted for in his analysis of the 2020 election results. For nearly every single argument he provides for why the claim of mass election fraud is wrong, there is a 1 to 1 argument match for why the vaccines are "safe and effective".

How is he able to discern that the legacy media, social media, big pharma, 3 letter agencies, the judiciary etc... are not telling the truth about vaccine safety and efficacy, yet he can't discern that the EXACT same actors followed the EXACT same play book when they claim the 2020 election was the "safest and most secure" ever. (lol, they even used the same "safe and..." slogan. Why not, I guess it worked great for the election so might as well re-use it for the vaccines.)

Has he ever stopped and asked himself what is harder to pull off?

Rigging an election in one country or rigging the vaccine trials for 3+ pharma companies and manipulating governments around the world to have them enact mandates to vaccinate their entire populations?

(Besides, they had to get rid of Trump to successfully carry out the vaccine mandates. Trump was pro-vaccines but he was not pro-mandates and pro-lockdowns, and certainly anti-WEF)

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I think RootClaim is onto something. They acknowledge they want to engage in constructive discussions and promote rational thought.

None of us is right 100% of the time and we need to promote this type of thinking and discussions.

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Nothing replaces the ability of INDIVIDUAL citizens to evaluate ALL evidence by whatever means they choose. If they have the statistical and scientific skills to evaluate raw data, that's great. But many, although incapable of that level of analysis, do have the ability to smell a rat by looking at conflicts of interest, inconsistency in testimony, and the track records of people on both sides of an issue. Those opinions of those individuals, if given unfettered access to all sides of an issue without censorship by government or corporate authorities, will always aggregate to a closer approximation of Truth than will be provided by some authoritarian "commission."

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022

I agree with you until I see election results. As in "what were they thinking?"

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"What were they thinking?" is the inevitable result of restricting access to information (censorship and propaganda). You know, democracy dies in darkness.

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Rootclaim's repurposed drug Proposal is dumb overthinking.

No need for any of that. Just rank order the studies on efficacy and ignore reliability. Take the top ten, all of them, that are nearest 100% safe and also cheap.

First go here: c19early.com then to Amazon. Problem solved.

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Scam. Another excuse for control/power.

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“claims that in five years we’ll all be fused with machines (an amazingly stable time horizon over the past few decades).”

Ha ha. Yeah, I’m going to be made one with my self-driving, fusion-powered car. For sure it’s happening. Right around the corner. Five years, max. Good thing I won’t have to ride in it much farther than the nearest hype-r-loop stop.

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Has anyone been following Spartacus. They maybe closer than you think. https://iceni.substack.com/p/draco-down-the-memory-hole?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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Sorry if I’m skeptical. I’m old enough to remember all kinds of pie-in-the-sky technology that was just 5 years in the future, from flying cars to domed cities to nuclear fusion for power generation, to a cure for cancer, to colonizing the moon/Mars. Remember when doctors and lawyers were going to be replaced by “expert systems”? What happened to “Watson”?

50 years later, and none of it is real because the complexity of actually making it work is far, far greater than making slick promotional material based on preposterous assumptions and flights of fancy. Instead we have a “breakthrough technology” in the mRNA “vaccines” that are killing and maiming millions and that could never have worked.

“We are smarter now” doesn’t wash. “We” aren’t smarter except for the fact that we now know domed cities etc. were nothing but hallucinations. As are self-driving cars and “trans humanism”. The underlying dynamics of these ludicrous claims hasn’t changed: they’re promoted by hucksters to scam and scare the gullible. I’m glad that the self-styled geniuses are going all in on this nonsense, because it will fail, and the failure is likely to take them with it.

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"It’s not a black box – it’s mathematical models of probability theory. It’s a complex system, right, it’s not simple. But every mathematician will understand what it does."

Is it available to every mathematician to review? Or at least SOME non-biased mathematicians? If not, it's a black box.

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People will always try to game the system. Here is a post from El Gato Malo from couple of months ago on how they are trying to manipulate the training data to make AI come up with politically correct results: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/when-reality-fails-to-align-with

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The famous Jim Bell of cypherpunk yore's "Assassination Politics" comes to mind as one thorny ramification of a mania for crypto prediction markets. He was certainly suppressed.

The two examples of MH17 and Assad CW false flag (like Sy Hersh, I always thought it was the Turks) are an interesting contrast in terms of an exercise in controlling for political bias. In such a hyperpartisan era, rigorous bias control may make for interesting strategies, although there's nothing necessarily mathy about it.

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This is a topic I can really sink my teeth into and was an exciting surprise this morning.

I assume you read "Superforecasting"? What did you think?

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022

i thought ukraine shot MH17 ?? ukrainian fighter jet in the air according to ukranian witnesses and russian radar. american intelligence refusing to release their data. the main people giving media information on the event were literal undercover SBU (Ukraine intelligence agency). JIT-team engaging in witness intimidation. putin's plane had similar visual markings and was on a very similar flight path to MH17, thus perhaps ukrainians were trying to kiil putin in retaliation for crimea defection

> A European air traffic controller said that MH-17 and the airliner carrying Russian President Vladimir Putin were initially on the same course. Possibly Washington and its vassal in Kiev thought MH-17 was Putin’s plane and destroyed the Malaysian flight by mistake.

> In order to avoid the consequences of such a provocation, the Russian government would deny that Putin’s plane was on a similar course.

> Even the Western presstitute media reports that separatists found the Malaysian airliner’s recorders, or black boxes, and turned them over to the investigation and that the recorders had not been tampered with. If the separatists were responsible for the attack, why would they hand over evidence against themselves?

> Why does Kiev refuse to release the communications between Ukrainian air traffic control and MH-17? Why was a civilian airliner routed over a combat zone? The Dutch report does not answer these questions. Washington prevented all answers that conflict with its propaganda.

> Only Washington, whose presstitutes can be relied on to control the explanations for Washington, and Washington’s vassal in Kiev had anything to gain from downing the airliner. Whether intentional or an accident, the downing of MH-17 was used to blacken Russia and to convince the EU to go along with Washington’s economic sanctions and military moves against Russia.

> As the Romans always asked: “Who benefits?” The answer to that question tells you who did it.

> Immediately after the shoot-down, the U.S. government sought to pin the blame on ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine and their Russian government backers. However, after CIA analysts had time to evaluate U.S. satellite, electronic and other intelligence data, the U.S. government went curiously silent about what it had discovered, including the possible identity of the people who were responsible. The U.S. reticence, after the initial haste to blame Russia, suggested that the more detailed findings undercut the original claims.

> A source who was briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that the CIA’s conclusion pointed toward a rogue Ukrainian operation involving a hard-line oligarch with the possible motive of shooting down Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official plane returning from South America that day, with similar markings as MH-17. The source said a Ukrainian warplane ascertained that the plane was not Putin’s but the attack went ahead anyway, with the assumption that the tragedy would be blamed on the pro-Russian rebels or on Russia directly.

> Officially, however, the U.S. government has not revised its initial claims that were made within five days of the shoot-down, fingering the rebels and the Russians. I have been unable to determine if the assessment of Ukrainian responsibility represented a dissident or consensus view inside the U.S. intelligence community.

> Although Ukraine would have been an obvious suspect in the attack, the Ukrainian SBU was invited to play a key role in the investigation along with investigators from Australia and the Netherlands. Under the JIT agreement, participating governments, which also include Belgium and Malaysia, have the right to block the release of information to the public.

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022Author

> The German word for "nipple" translates literally to "breast wart".

> The word "bonobo" (the primate) was the result of a typo of the name of the town of "Bolobo" in Zaire.

> Squirrels are the number one cause of power outages in the U.S.

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haha! reminds me of a story my son told of the server farm in Austin he was working on, the power went out, they checked everything twice, and finally went up to the roof, where there was a fried squirrel stretched pole to pole across their transformer

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Aug 3, 2022·edited Aug 3, 2022

"mathematical models of probability theory"-In theory this a great idea.

...

probabilities involving Long Covid /ADE induced SARS2 PASC (SARS-AIDS)

33% of anyone fully recovering

66% of anyone improving

99.9% avoiding w/ aggressive early treatment

*everyone's immune health & Genetic Factors vary

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I am kinda holding at arm's length your use of the word 'superficially' here. There has been in depth study, to the limits of info that could be legally acquired, which is far more than most people realize. The fraud was widespread, but especially focused in the crucial swing states, and in their most populous counties, which is enough to make all the difference for the electoral college. It is proven that there was a different algorithm running in each state, so 'superficially', it looked like nothing at all. Why should we allow the use of ballot counting machines that have internal modems manufactured in China? Why allow software with 'partial vote count' or 'weighted voting' features? Why allow vote compiling to be sent overseas for tabulation? We have data stream copies from that night, along with IP addresses of the machines they went to, the physical location addresses, and the vote counts both before they left, and when they got back. Ask yourself why over 1000 of your fellow citizens would give sworn depositions, to be used in court proceedings, with the chance they will be called to testify, of criminal acts they observed while acting as poll watchers that night. And many of these people were professionals, including doctors, nurses, lawyers, and professors. The only reason to allow machine ballot counting and refuse public audits is to facilitate the theft of elections. A feature, not a bug.

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FWIW, I like neither Trump nor Biden, especially as a President. But more of Trump's values and aims were congruent with voters, which is why he is still popular.

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