There are many ways to approach the decision making process. The most common is to make decisions that maximize the probability of the desired outcome, which we’ll call “position decision making”. Negative decision making is another approach that focuses on all possible outcomes and choosing to minimize the possible downsides…

In this post, self-concept = identity = model of yourself. Some people would like to think of themselves as rational beings. They believe that they dictate their life according to reason and a relatively impartial evaluation of the evidence at hand. Unfortunately, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Even…

This is a paper I wrote back in high school, thought is was worth sharing. I did get some things wrong (Symbolic Manipulation is the not the main field of research in AI), but I think it’s still somewhat relevant right now. Artificial Intelligence is a relatively new field of…

Addictive behavior patterns are characterized by an increasing desire to do an activity after doing the activity. This increase in desire can be immediate, in the case of someone who can’t stop eating junk food, or it can have a delay, like in the case of porn or drugs. …

If there are seven billion people on Earth and roughly half of them are male, that works out to about three billion men (males above the age of 18). In an ideal world, all three billion men would have some productive occupation that benefits society in some way. Clearly this…

Google gives me this definition for the word delusion: delusion (noun): an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder. Based on this definition, delusions are beliefs that run contrary to…

So here’s two ways to use language. Let’s say I’m going to pick up a girl in a bar, so I have a goal in mind, and the girl is irrelevant to the goal insofar as she could be another girl, so it’s a psychopathic goal in some ways…It’s like…

'It's all because of doing things by halves,' [Zorba] would often say to me, and 'saying things by halves, being good by halves, that the world is in the mess it's in today. Do things properly by God! One good knock for each nail and you'll win through! God hates…

Original RibbonFarm Post: The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office” According to the Gervais Principle, there are three classes of people in an organization: sociopaths, clueless, and losers. Sociopaths and losers know the game while the clueless don’t (hence the label “clueless). Losers know they’re losing the…