prior probability

To celebrate Christmas Eve or Nochebuena, below is a reproduction of a painting by El Greco (the Nativity).

On this day (22 December) in 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason by a military court-martial in France. In the words of one commentator (see here), “The Dreyfus affair is an extraordinary tale of injustice, deceit, and coverup.” Captain Dreyfus, who was accused of communicating military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, was eventually exonerated 12 years later.

On this day (21 December) in 1913, the now-defunct New York World published the first “word-cross” puzzle. That particular puzzle, which is pictured below, was created by one Arthur Wynne (see here and here), and according to Wikipedia, an illustrator later reversed the “word-cross” label to “cross-word.” The New York World closed down in 1931, but the crossword puzzle lives on!

Would the world be a better place without the Internet? Or at the very least, what if we all voluntarily refrained from using the Internet during the holidays?

Among other things, this board game includes 250 Conspiracy Question Cards, 25 Cover-up Cards, and an instruction booklet, “unless the Illuminati took them.” What are you waiting for? Order yours here today!

My father Don Francisco, my son Kleber Enrique, and I went off the beaten tourist path and visited the Angeles National Forest on Friday 12/16, one of the best places to visit in Los Angeles. Pictured below are some snapshots of our visit.

I mentioned in my previous post how no one at Derek Thompson’s Progress Summit, which took place earlier this week in Los Angeles, bothered to define what they meant by “progress”–no one but Astro Teller that is. Among other things, Dr Teller explained how his idea of progress is informed by his work at X, Google’s secretive moonshot factory. (According to its website: “X is a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs” whose goal is to solve “the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement.”) To be successful at X, Teller explained, you not only have to be open to new ideas; you also have to be willing to discard those ideas when they don’t pan out.

In other words, progress is a process of elimination! At one point, for example, Dr Teller said something to the effect, “We have to redefine our sense of victory as learning–that’s progress.” According to this more modest view of progress, “progress” (small “p”) is about learning to decide which ideas to explore further, i.e. figuring out which ideas and potential solutions are not worth pursuing and then “composting” (Teller’s apt term) those discarded ideas. But my most memorable take-away was Dr Teller’s version of the Day of the Dead tradition in Mexico, my favorite day of the year. He and his team at X not only honor their deceased ancestors; they also celebrate all their discarded ideas.

What is “progress”? I attended The Atlantic’s first-ever “Progress Summit” this week hoping to get a straight answer, but, ironically, no one at the conference made any attempt to actually define the concept of progress! Perhaps progress is synonymous with economic growth, but if so, how should we balance the inevitable tradeoffs between economic and environmental goods without resorting to trite incantations or magical wands like “sustainability”? (Alas, this litmus test would have disqualified most of the invited speakers at the Progress Summit.) As it happens, the speaker who came the closest to providing a non-tautological definition of progress was Astro Teller (pictured below), the CEO of X, Google’s secretive “moonshot factory”. I will share Teller’s conception of progress in my next post.