Robot Factories There have been a lot of advancements recently in robot assisted manufacturing. One article I read recently was about a completely automated pizza crust factory, that could make 1000 pizza crusts per minute or something. Robots are very efficient, and they have already started creeping into the our common experience. […]
MLM Universe
Survivorship Bias Survivorship bias is very dangerous, as it doesn’t happen inside our brains. The filtering, which is normally done inside our brain, is being done by the world, is the result of unpredictable chaos theory. But since it seems an easy task to study the winners, that’s what people do. Network […]
Immortal Monkey Apocalypse
Shakespeare Experiment There’s a theory that if you put enough monkeys on an island, each banging away on a typewriter, they’ll eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare. This is true in theory, so long as they bang on a typewriter long enough, a certain percentage of the random stuff they type will make […]
Poltergeist Origin Story
Drug Dealers There was this drug dealer, a friend of a friend, who started dealing just enough to support his habit. Then he started dealing enough to support his and his friends’ habit. Pretty soon he was making a lot of money, so much he quit his job and became a full time […]
Pythagorean Mysticism
Triangle Cult Pythagoras is credited with discovering the secrets of the right triangle, namely A^2+B^2=C^2, but this is not likely true. Not only was Pythagoras likely a fictional creation of the Pythagorean cult who worshipped numbers, but this same idea was discovered by plenty other ancient cultures. For example, long before the Greeks […]
Emergent Soul Theory
Unconscious Influence Cialdini has long studied the forces of influence that exist outside of our conscious awareness. The most common is social proof, but this one is a bit tricky, since everybody knows what social proof is, and every tends to try to leverage social proof in their favor. But all of us […]
Emergent Financial Parasites
Black Jack System Before the advent and widespread use of facial recognition technology, a group of MIT students developed a very lucrative blackjack system. They made a movie about it, but the movie was necessarily altered to make room for good guys and bad guys and back stories and character arcs. But the […]
Doppelganger Apocalypse
Artificial Scarcity A very common and old marketing strategy is to create and manage a level of artificial scarcity just enough to calibrate and maintain the desired purchasing level. For example, a company will be getting ready to release a new product, and advertise like crazy, building up massive demand. Then they purposely […]
Death Cycles
Dog Machine A friend of mine has this automatic dog machine. The dog drops the ball in the machine, the machine waits a random amount of time, and then spits the ball out with a random amount of force. The dog, after dropping the ball in, backs up, gets ready, and catches the […]
Mental Brain Illusions
What You See Isn’t Real There are a lot of cool optical illusions. They are, of course, based on mismatch between what you see, and what you think you are seeing. Our eyes and our visual cortex need to make a lot of assumptions about what we think we see, and up to […]
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