Although impressive, it is worth to notice that Cicero only played blitz games (in which each turn lasts 5 minutes, and players are not usually very invested).
An AI beating 90% of players in blitz chess is less of an achievement than an AI beating 90% of players in 40 min chess; and I expect the same to be true for Diplomacy. Also, backstabbing and elaborate schemes are considerably rarer in blitz.
I would be very curious to see Cicero compete in a Diplomacy game with longer turns.
I agree, and I would extend the advice to all the expressions which are short, fashionable, and somewhat opaque.
In Politics and the English Language, Orwell offered further arguments for avoiding ready-made phrases.
This look like a technical statement of the Anna Karenina principle,
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
But then the problem becomes finding the right M which maximises your utility function.The optimal solution might be very unintuitive and it may require a long description to be understood. M will not be (in general) a smooth set.
Strictly speaking, for a chaotic system the magnitude of the differences should be amplified exponentially with time (with rates given by Lyapunov exponents).
Even without Internet, greek agoras had their deal of mobs, tyrannids and groupthink. Logic is only one of the many weapon of rethoric, but it is an useful weapon (it struck me to notice that even 4chan/pol now has a table of logical fallacies in evidence at the top of the board).
Yes, if we have to be optimistic in the long run cancel culture could help society by developing anticorps.
Corretto, non faremo noche loca fino all’alba :D
The immediate cause for the fact that “lead pollution in 200 AD was lower than lead pollution in 1 AD” is that “the extraction from Rio Tinto mines in 200 AD was lower than the extraction from Rio Tinto mines in 1 AD”. Now, according to Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotheca historica, V, xxxvi-xxxvi), the Carthaginians used mechanical and hydraulic technology for exploiting the Rio Tinto mines (they probably also employed chemical acids). According to Bromehead, this impressive technology was initially expanded by the Roman conquerors; but eventually the Romans switched to using large masses of slaves (as described by Pliny), becuse they were not able to keep the mechanical drainage systems running.
I don’t necessarily agree with your depiction of the Romans as being “parasitic”. Just because they did not produce food, does not mean that they were not valued.
By “parasitic” I mean that Rome imported a lot and exported no products; but you are right in pointing out that the “military services” exported by Rome (and the common market) had probably a great economic value for the provinces. Still, do you agree that Rome was not self-sufficient?
The Romans were interested in math, its just that most of them weren’t located in Italia. Just look at the various mathematicians who lived in Alexandria, Athens, or Constantinople, and invented the fields of trigonometry (among others).
I challenge you to name one mathematical treatise, written between 100 BC and 500 AD, which is on the same tier as the work by Archimedes, Ipparchus or Apollonius (the difference in quality is so big that it is not subjective).
If you with “Roman” mean “anyone living in the Roman Empire” then yes, some Roman were interested in higher math. But the mathematics in the Imperial age was a shadow of what mathematics was before the Roman conquest. Trigonometry was first developed in Alexandria when Egypt was an independent Hellenistic kingdom; then in 146 BC the Romans installed a puppet king in Egypt, who proceeded to persecute the Greek èlites and to annihilate every intellectual opposition (he literally appointed a spearmen officer as the new director of the Library of Alexandria). To escape the persecution, many Greek intellectuals (including the mathematicians) escaped; some of them went to India, where they founded a school which continued to develop trigonometry (sine and cosine were first defined in India).
It is true that some (not so many) Romans learned greek maths even well into the V century (for example, emperor Procopius Anthemius studied under Proclus), but all the mathematics of the Imperial age consists of commentaries and collections of previous results. Sometimes they are brilliant commentaries, but still commentaries.
Also, the Romans heavily benefited the economy of the Greeks. An interconnected empire meant that Greek goods (such as amphorae, pottery, or other luxury items) could be traded anywhere in the empire, with only the nominal port taxes placed on it by the Empire.
I do not have much knowledge about the Imperial age, and maybe this was true in 100-200 AD, but it was definitely not true in the aftermath of the Roman conquest (see Rostovtzeff’s books).
Thank you for the article! In my opinion, one of the main issues is that it does not seem to explain how the Eastern part of the Empire survived.
Rome was never economically self-sufficient. The city of Rome was a sink that absorbed food and products from the provinces, and produced nothing. The millions of inhabitants of Italy could survive only thanks to the subjugated provinces of the Empire.
Other areas of the Empire, notably Egypt and Gaul, were self-sufficient. In particular, Egypt was the main exporter of manufactured good (Roman travelers to Alexandria usually lamented the fact that the local inhabitant were greedy and always busy making money). In general, the Eastern part of the Empire was much richer than the West, was more urbanized, and had many more ancient and complex local administrative institutions.
When the Empire split between a Western and a Eastern half in the IV century, the Western part was in serious trouble. The only relevant food-exporting provinces left to the Western Empire was Africa. When Africa was lost, the Empire quickly fell. On the contrary, the fall of the Western Empire had no dramatic consequences on the Eastern Empire (ok, it was a big export market loss, which probably contributed a lot to the social tensions and the riots of the Justianan era; but a crisis due to a lack of an export market for your manufactured goods is way better than a crisis due to a lack of food to import).
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As concerns your chart of civilizations moving in the north, in my opinion this is only the result of a bias: we learn in school about the civilizations more relevant to our history. I do not buy your thesis that the intensive agricolture drove the rise and fall of the civilizations:
Ptolemaic Egypt had an estimated population of about 8 millions of inhabitants, if I recall correctly. This is a great increase with respect to Ancient Egypt, and it was largely made possible by improvement in agricolture (not only plough, but irrigation and better agronomical techniques). This is after the “civilization hot spot” moved north of Egypt in your scheme—I am not sure if this count as a point for or against your model.
I have not the time now to look for estimations of the Roman population through history, but (if you trust my half-educated guess) I do not expect a demographic boom to have took place after the Roman conquest. The Roman Empire was forged by conquest, killings and enslavements. In The Economic and Social History of the Hellenistic World (a bit aged, but highly recommended!), Rostovtzeff speaks on the contrary of “race suicide” describing the demographic decline of Greece in the II and I century BCE. The parts of the Empire that were already civilized before the Roman conquest (namely Greece and the Near East), already had infrastructures and institututions before the Romans, which were ofted of superior quality (example: the celebrated Roman aqueducts worked by gravity, while e.g. the city of Pergamon in 180 BCE had watertight metal pipes which lifted water over a difference of altitude of >100 m. Also, the Roman aqueducts were designed by Greek slave engineers; the Romans never learned to project them on their own. Once the last educated Greek slaves dies, they could not buy anymore aqueducts. I hope that this specific example clarifies the general trend); and on top of this, after the Roman conquest, they also had to feed an economically parasite overlord. So I do not expect the population of the Eastern part of the empire to have substantially risen durin Roman rule (also Wikipedia says that it decreased, but I did not verify the sources). On the contrary, the population did probably rise (after the initial mass slaughters) in the formerly sparsely populated regions of Northern Western Europe; but these are also the provinces that in your chart became more relavant for civilization after the fall of Rome, so this does not seem to advance your theory.
There is no way in which Charlemagne’s empire was more relevant than the Umayyad Caliphate in 800 AD , in any reasonable “civilization” metric.
Southern Europe was economically more developed than northern europe until the XVI century, and while the causes that reversed this pattern are object of debate among scholars (I recommend this paper), I do not recall seeing soil depletion as a proposed cause (instead, the shift in global trade route and the centralized governments likely played a role).
This is anecdotal, but if you look at technological progress from 200BCE (the Punic Wars) and 200AD, you find that not much has happened, except the expansion of trade networks.
While this may be true, it overlooks the fact that many technologies that were developed in the precedent period (for example, the lighthouse, the cog and the gear wheel) were lost during the Roman age, not to be recovered until the Renaissance—or later.
Heron describes many artifacts that require tiny metal lives to be built, copying from previous Hellenistic sources, but at his age nobody knows anymore how to make tiny metal lives (he only describes a way to make big, wooden lives).
In the Imperial age the derivative was negative, but the technological and cultural level was obviously superior to the High Middle Ages. Between 500AD and 1000AD the urban society in Europe had become practically non-existent.
Actually the mutual information has some well-defined operational meaning. For example, the maximum rate at which we can transmit a signal through a noisy channel is given by the mutual information between the input and the output of the channel. So it depends on which task you are interested in.
First, a little technical precisation: Poincaré′s recurrence theorem applies to classical systems whose phase space is finite. So, if you believe that the universe is finite, then you have recurrence; otherwise no recurrence.
I think that your conclusion is correct under the hypothesis that the universe exists from an infinite time, and that our current situation of low entropy is the result of a random fluctuation.
The symmetry is broken by the initial condition. If at t=0 the entropy is very low, then it is almost sure that it will rise. The expert consensus is that there has been a special event (the big bang), that you can modelize as an initial condition of extremely high entropy.
It seems unlikely that the big bang was the result of a fluctuation from a previously unordered universe: you can estimate the probability of a random fluctuation resulting in the Earth’s existence. If I recall correctly Penrose did it explicitly, but you do not need the math to understand that (as already pointed out) “a solar system appears from thermal equilibrium” is extremely more likely that “an entire universe appears from thermal equilibrium”. Therefore, under you hypothesis, we should have expected with probability of almost 1, to be in the only solar system in existence in the observable universe.
I wish to stress that these are pleasant philosophical speculations, but I do not wish to assign an high confidence to anything said here: even if they work well for our purposes, I feel a bit nervous in extrapolating mathematical models it to the entire universe.
I think that Caplan is referring to a scenario in which the UBI is high enough to cause a significant reduction of the employment rate.
1000 $ per month would not achieve this effect.
By the way, here in Italy the state has recently enacted a law to give 780 € per month to unemployed people. The party which proposed this law has been mostly voted by southern Italy, whose ruling classes correctly predicted that it would have had the effect of increasing undeclared work.
If the Earth was stationary in an inertial reference frame, no.
If you want to compute tidal forces in the reference frame of the Earth (i.e., extract the quadrupole term from a painful integral), you have to include an apparent force which accounts for the fact that the Earth is really rotating.
At first I was convinced by your argument, but then I tought to apply it also to the voters.
Both parties would be probably better with a lower turnout (less undecided voters to convince, less effort required to campaign); but it does not seem correct to conclude that we should not encourage voting. An high level of engagement of the local popolation in politics is supposed to be a good thing for democracies, even if it requires more work.
I do not think that donations to political parties should be tax deductable. But I hesitate on the abstract principle “Do not encourage prisoners dilemmas”. Sometimes it is good that everyone makes more effort, because that effort produces something valuable. Two rival pencil companies “play” in opposition to each other (in the estreme case in which the pencil demand is totally inelastic, it would be a zero sum game, because if more people buy pencils from company A, then less people buy pencils from company B). But this does not mean that the state’s regulations should encourage monopolies: monopolies are (generally) not good.
Depending on your utility function, there are situations in which you should wish to encourage a prisoner dilemma between two factions, if this yields benefits to you or other people.
Maybe your principle applies when the relevant model really has no third party which gains from A and B fighting. But I can not think to many such situations in the society (even in wars, there is someone (weapon sellers?) who profits if the belligerants fight harder).
Hi, I think I see what you mean. You can certainly say that the flap, as a part of the initial conditions, is part of the causes of the tornado. But this is true in the same sense in which all of the initial conditions are part of the cause of the tornado. The flap caused the tornado together with everything else. All the initial ocean temperatures, the position of the jet streams, the northern annular mode index, everything. If everything is the cause, then “being the cause of the tornado” is a property which carries exactly 0 bits of information, since everything is the cause.
I prefer to think that an event A “caused” another event B if the probability of B, conditioned on A happening, is at least greater than the prior probability of A.
Thank you! I had never thought that Aristarchus might have intentionally seeked a lower bound for the relative size of Sun and Moon. This does indeed make a lot of sense.
Thank you for your reply! The differences in economic developement are undoubtedly a part of the story; it is hard to isolate the “material culture” from the rest of the culture. I never said it has to be direct cultural transmission (expecially in the case of Poland, which was resettled by colonists from all the other areas of Poland. Barely one sixth of the population of Western Poland in 1950 was made of Germans who inhabited in the same place in 1939; is it enough to have direct cultural transmission? Maybe, but the quick resettlement itself may have been a cause of cultural divergence).
The economy and the environment shape the culture, but sometimes also the opposite is true (you can tell which is the border between Dominican Republic and Haiti simply by looking at Google Earth). Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy/Veneto are two sides of the same Po Valley, and as far as I know have similar densities of small manifactures: so yes, maybe the former border is a part of the explaination for the fact that they have ended up opposing each other politically.
Yes, the lead pollution was measured with arctic ice; this is the original paper. The authors belive that the peak in the eraly Imperial era was mainly caused by the Rio Tinto ore mines (so yes, it is pollution from all Europe, but mainly from Spain).
I agree with your main point that the first century BCE and the first century CE were a peak of economic developement of the ancient world (as shown by the graphs); I think that this is not in contradiction with what I am saying. In the first century BCE, many of the Roman provinces were of recent conquests, with much of their local institutions and know-how intact. Think of the Antikythera mechanism, which was built around the first century BCE.
In the III century, nobody could have built nothing even remotely similar to the Antikythera mechanism. If I understand correctly your overall thesis, this was because a shortage of fuel led to a simiplification of the society, so that the supply chain for building an Antikythera mechanism was not anymore feasible. But the main bottleneck in building an Antikythera mechanism is not the wood that you need to burn in making the cogs and the gears; the main bottleneck are the mathematical and mechanical knowledge necessary to design it, and the artigianal expertise needed to build its components. The Romans did not care about any of it. No respectable Roman learned mathematics: it was a suspiciously Greek, nerdy thing, unsuited to the practical Roman spirit. The first Latin translation of Euclid’s Elements was written in the Renaissance. I am sure that this played a significant role in the loss of mechanical technology after the first century (and, if you believe that mechanical technology was significant for the Hellenistic economy (a point about which scholars disagree), also played a role in the economic decline).
The vanishing of the economy was not, in my view, an unavoidable effect of resource depletion, but it was a consequence of the specific political and economical situation in the Imperial age. The Greek and Hellenistic states kept a complex and viable economy for much more centuries than “peak-Rome”, with much fewer resources to start with (a narrow bucket, in your metaphor). Byzantium/Costantinople/Istanbul was there before “peak-Rome”, and continued to be one of the main cities of the world long after Rome. How come Costantinople did not fill its bucket in 2000 years, while Rome (with access to a much wider bucket) did it in a few centuries? (maybe I am misrepresenting or excessively simplifying your view; I apologize if so)
Do you see a clear pattern in the sequence Rome → Costantinople → Baghdad → Cordoba → Costantinople → Cairo → Costantinople → London → New York? How does this succession fit in your model?
The fact that the Enterprise has survived for a long time may be due to the fact that captain Kirk overrules Spock in the areas where he is not competent (for example, when he estimates the probability of escaping from a black hole), while he is good enough in other aspects of his job.
The fact that Captain Kirk decides to ovverrule Spock’s 99,999999 % predictions is strong evidence that he does not trust them.
Basically, the fact that the sea rises not only in the directions of the Sun and of the Moon, but also in the opposite directions.
If you think that the Sun and the Moon attract just the sea, but that the Earth does not move, then you would expect the water to bulge only towards them, and not also in the opposite direction.
If you instead think that the whole Earth is falling towards the Moon and the Sun, you have to subtract the motion of the center of the Earth, and you will correctly predict to see the water rise in both directions. The center of the Earth is attracted more than the sea in the opposite side, but less than the sea on the side of the Moon/Sun, so when you subtract you see a high tide in both sides.
In the Placita Philosophorum (probably written by Aetius) it is written that (Ps. Plut. Plac. 3.17):
Now, this is very unclear (and the English translation does not help—for example πνεύματος is not “a wind”, the Stoichs used it to mean a much more abstract kind of influence); Galileo was confused by this passage too. But it looks like Seulecus assumed that the Earth moves in order to explain tides.