Mediocristan and Extremistan are terms coined (I think) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan. They don’t exactly mean what you say they do; the idea is that Mediocristan is an imaginary country where things have thin-tailed (e.g., normal) distributions and so differences are usually modest in size, and Extremistan is an imaginary country where things have fat-tailed (e.g., power-law) distributions and so differences are sometimes huge, and then you say something belongs to Mediocristan or Extremistan depending on whether the associated distributions are thin-tailed or fat-tailed.
The ones from EY’s “Local Validity …” post are, I think, just made up for the occasion and he intends it to be obvious from context at least roughly what they mean.
“Code of the Light”: how good, principled, rational, nice, honest people behave.
“Straw authoritarians”: strawman-authoritarians: that is, authoritarians who are transparently stupid and malicious, rather than whatever the most defensible sort of authoritarian might be.
The “memetic collapse” thing is a link, to a (spit) Facebook post by EY where he says this: “The Internet is selecting harder on a larger population of ideas, and sanity falls off the selective frontier once you select hard enough [...] the Internet, and maybe television before it, selected much more harshly from a much wider field of memes; and also allowed tailoring content more narrowly to narrower audiences [...] We’re looking at a collapse of reference to expertise because deferring to expertise costs a couple of hedons compared to being told that all your intuitions are perfectly right, and at the harsh selective frontier there’s no room for that. We’re looking at a collapse of interaction between bubbles because there used to be just a few newspapers serving all the bubbles; and now that the bubbles have separated there’s little incentive to show people how to be fair in their judgment of ideas for other bubbles [...] It seems plausible to me that *basic* software for intelligent functioning is being damaged by this hypercompetition [...] If you look at how some bubbles are talking and thinking now, “intellectually feral children” doesn’t seem like entirely inappropriate language”. In other words: changes in how communication works have enabled processes that systematically make us stupider, less tolerant, etc., and also get off my lawn.
“Glomarization” does yield search-engine hits when you spell it right; one of them is a wikipedia page entitled “Glomar response” which explains it pretty clearly.
I don’t think memorizing the Bible or the digits of pi is a great example of “counterfeit understanding”; some of the people who memorize the Bible have a pretty good understanding of what it means, and people who memorize the digits of pi generally (I think) understand what digits mean. One of the best expositions of the counterfeit-understanding thing I know of comes from Richard Feynman writing about the terrible state of science education in Brazil at one time (I don’t know whether it’s improved since then); see e.g. here.
Regarding digits of pi, N. Gisin promotes the constructivist idea that certain mathematical expressions mean nothing in that they do not relate to anything real. One cannot make a scientific hypothesis involving them. The hundred-billionth twenty digit sequence of pi is smaller than the Plank length.
There’s still a well-defined answer to the question of what the digits mean, and indeed of what they mean as digits of pi; e.g., the hundred-billionth digit of pi is what you get by carrying out a pi-computing algorithm and looking at the hundred-billionth digit of its output. Anyway, no one is memorizing that many digits of pi.
[EDITED to add:] On the other hand, people certainly memorize enough digits of pi that, e.g., an error in the last digit they memorize would make a sub-Planck-length difference to the length of a (euclidean-planar) circle whose diameter is that of the observable universe. (Size of observable universe is tens of billions of light-years; a year is 3x10^7 seconds so that’s say 10^18 light-seconds; light travels at 3x10^8 m/s so that’s < 10^27m; I forget just how short the Planck length is but I’m pretty sure it’s > 10^-50m; so 80 digits should be enough, and even I have memorized that many digits of pi (and forgotten many of them again).
A few clarifications on the “new words” section:
Mediocristan and Extremistan are terms coined (I think) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan. They don’t exactly mean what you say they do; the idea is that Mediocristan is an imaginary country where things have thin-tailed (e.g., normal) distributions and so differences are usually modest in size, and Extremistan is an imaginary country where things have fat-tailed (e.g., power-law) distributions and so differences are sometimes huge, and then you say something belongs to Mediocristan or Extremistan depending on whether the associated distributions are thin-tailed or fat-tailed.
The ones from EY’s “Local Validity …” post are, I think, just made up for the occasion and he intends it to be obvious from context at least roughly what they mean.
“Code of the Light”: how good, principled, rational, nice, honest people behave.
“Straw authoritarians”: strawman-authoritarians: that is, authoritarians who are transparently stupid and malicious, rather than whatever the most defensible sort of authoritarian might be.
The “memetic collapse” thing is a link, to a (spit) Facebook post by EY where he says this: “The Internet is selecting harder on a larger population of ideas, and sanity falls off the selective frontier once you select hard enough [...] the Internet, and maybe television before it, selected much more harshly from a much wider field of memes; and also allowed tailoring content more narrowly to narrower audiences [...] We’re looking at a collapse of reference to expertise because deferring to expertise costs a couple of hedons compared to being told that all your intuitions are perfectly right, and at the harsh selective frontier there’s no room for that. We’re looking at a collapse of interaction between bubbles because there used to be just a few newspapers serving all the bubbles; and now that the bubbles have separated there’s little incentive to show people how to be fair in their judgment of ideas for other bubbles [...] It seems plausible to me that *basic* software for intelligent functioning is being damaged by this hypercompetition [...] If you look at how some bubbles are talking and thinking now, “intellectually feral children” doesn’t seem like entirely inappropriate language”. In other words: changes in how communication works have enabled processes that systematically make us stupider, less tolerant, etc., and also get off my lawn.
“Glomarization” does yield search-engine hits when you spell it right; one of them is a wikipedia page entitled “Glomar response” which explains it pretty clearly.
I don’t think memorizing the Bible or the digits of pi is a great example of “counterfeit understanding”; some of the people who memorize the Bible have a pretty good understanding of what it means, and people who memorize the digits of pi generally (I think) understand what digits mean. One of the best expositions of the counterfeit-understanding thing I know of comes from Richard Feynman writing about the terrible state of science education in Brazil at one time (I don’t know whether it’s improved since then); see e.g. here.
Regarding digits of pi, N. Gisin promotes the constructivist idea that certain mathematical expressions mean nothing in that they do not relate to anything real. One cannot make a scientific hypothesis involving them. The hundred-billionth twenty digit sequence of pi is smaller than the Plank length.
There’s still a well-defined answer to the question of what the digits mean, and indeed of what they mean as digits of pi; e.g., the hundred-billionth digit of pi is what you get by carrying out a pi-computing algorithm and looking at the hundred-billionth digit of its output. Anyway, no one is memorizing that many digits of pi.
[EDITED to add:] On the other hand, people certainly memorize enough digits of pi that, e.g., an error in the last digit they memorize would make a sub-Planck-length difference to the length of a (euclidean-planar) circle whose diameter is that of the observable universe. (Size of observable universe is tens of billions of light-years; a year is 3x10^7 seconds so that’s say 10^18 light-seconds; light travels at 3x10^8 m/s so that’s < 10^27m; I forget just how short the Planck length is but I’m pretty sure it’s > 10^-50m; so 80 digits should be enough, and even I have memorized that many digits of pi (and forgotten many of them again).
Thanks! I will incorporate your comments into the review!
I have incorporated the comments of gym into my review.
Pedantic note: it’s “gjm”, not “gym”; they’re my initials.
Fixed! Thanks!