A Bouquet of Wild Ideas

A Bouquet of Wild Ideas for your Amusement

A simple algorithm for optimizing traffic flow decisions: maximize your expected minimum speed. I believe, but have not proven, that this is inherently cooperative.

We all have a very strong instinct to band together in wartime. Hence any limited government tends to move towards totalitarianism when the threat (or opportunity) of war appears.

Comedy shows our inner animal (and child) peeking through our clothes. For a moment this inner exile is freed from the chains of fear, guilt, and shame, and gets acknowledgement, admiration, and success.

It is easy to see that some math results are trivial - but are any non-trivial?
More precisely: can non-triviality be defined in any non-quantitative way?
I doubt it. In fact, I throw this out as a challenge!
(and if there is no non-trivial definition of non-triviality, in what sense does math exist? Merely as grammar?? Quite a come-down for the Queen of Sciences!)

And similarly we might ask: Would an infinite Intelligence have any need for philosophy?
I would claim that philosophy addresses not only irrationality and stupidity, but also linguistic imprecision:
so if we correct the above question, we get the argument that a perfect intelligence with a perfect language would have no need for philosophy;
but what would a "perfect language" be? (If not a deus ex machina, perhaps an oxymoron: one might claim that any language is a reduction (redaction), hence the only "perfect" language would be one which was not a reduction and hence not useful (or not a "language").)
I have gained more respect for the study of philosophy as I have learned more about our human capacity for self-deception. (A third area of philosophy is self-referential problems and paradoxes, but I would claim that this is merely a recreation!)
If the legitimate (medicinal) functions of philosophy are the first two above, note that one borders on psychology and the other on philology or elenchics. One might still ask, then, in what sense philosophy exists independently of these other fields? Reduction of philosophy to linguistic analysis seems to be a British pastime; reduction of philosophy to psychological or learning-disability analysis is a less common approach, but one which might be interesting.

Some of the most key elements of the modern Stalinist police state can be found in Elizabethan England: informers, agents provocateurs, heavy publicity given to staged police triumphs, systematic calumniation of resistors, and use of solitary confinement for brainwashing adversaries. One might think of it as the first thoroughgoing implementation of Machiavelli. "Machiavel" was an insult in Elizabethan times, but that does not imply that the insult was never accurate.

The indices, in matrix algebra, can themselves be treated as values at a singularity, and subjected to perturbation. This approach can produce, for example, a linear operator with embedded local subspaces. This can be used, for example, to model a rotating coordinate system. By introducing complex erturbation values, one can thus model time-harmonic transformations.

Why do men like breasts? I conjecture that males who do may have been slightly more likely to stand by their pregnant mates, and hence more likely to have grandchildren. See Elaine Morgan for context on such fun questions.

From the same point of view, one may ask why not all women are equally beautiful? (No, I'm not suggesting that beauty precludes individuality.) Beauty is certainly affected by the translucency of very good or bad character, and sometimes by physical or psychological injury; but there does seem to be more variation than these causes can explain. One hypothesis might be that princesses tend to have fewer grandchildren. Another hypothesis (also applicable to various male endowments) might be that a paleolithic tribe is healthier if pecking orders remain reasonably stable, and inequality of endowments helps cut down on the scope of competition for rank. (As applied within a single sex, this might seem to imply a one-dimensional definition of talent; but this hypothesis looks better if we consider that women are, among other things, goals for men, and vice versa.)

The polity of the U.S. Constitution relies on separations. A problem with such a structure is that, once a separation is pierced, it is not necessarily self-repairing. The most fundamental of these separations is the divide between those who operate the machinery of the state and those who observe and criticize them.

The Bell Curve argued that intelligence is an almost universally applicable talent. One might ask, then, what limits intelligence, and why is the distribution so wide? Some hypothetical downsides to intelligence, from an evolutionary point of view, might be:
- larger infant brain volume (some correlation) might imply higher risk of mother dying in chlidbirth;
- possible correlation to less ability to act decisively in emergency?
- possible correlation to overstress?
- possible correlation to schizophrenia?
- reduced chance of successful social bonding?

One can envision the process of salvation or damnation as a choice to learn or not. (The great criterion of learning is not how fast, but whether one learns.) We all resist learning: the question is whether illumination or autonomy will win out.

A related bit of theological speculation: many of the most old-fashioned Christian notions of afterlife can be couched in terms of genetic optimization of intelligent software agents, from the software's point of view!

A similar but odder thought: one approach to theodicy (the problem of evil) would be to stipulate that EVERYONE balks at some level of duty: and that some aspect of real moral growth requires that we "hit bottom" by seeing the limits of our own goodwill. (Shades of Martin Luther!)

Sex ... (Oops, how did THAT pop up?? (Ideas are thoughts, but is every thought an idea? (given that we tend to rationalize strong desires (wretched pun about procreative roots of creativity ) ) ) )