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Watch out for Sucker Problem

by Gyanvitaranam

The mind can be a wonderful tool for self-delusion. Ever since civilization began, we have been blaming the world for not fitting into our rational models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our employment needs, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.

We humans facing limited knowledge and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives. In addition, there is a mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events derived in simple ancestral habitat.

All the plethora of information, on occasion, has explosive consequences, and we seem unaware of the backward-fitting suit, much like tailors who take great pride in....

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