Nabeel Qurishi:

“I suspect that when the history of the 21st century is written circa 2100, he [Girard] will be seen as one of the great intellectuals” – Peter Thiel

When Blake Masters was posting his great notes on Peter Thiel’s lectures at Stanford, I found myself fascinated by the influence of Rene Girard.

Girard’s an original thinker. I’m not fully persuaded by his worldview: it explains a lot, but not everything. I’ve summarized his views here.

1. Mimesis determines what you want: In Girard’s view, people have appetites, which are your basic evolutionary needs: e.g. hunger; and desires, which are all other wants, e.g. the desire for a diamond ring. Girard’s belief is that people form desires based on what others around them want.

This is known as the ‘mimetic mechanism’. People take their cues from the people around them. They use other people as ‘models’, and (subconsciously) want what other people want, while rationalizing the whole time. In the diamond ring example, companies like DeBeers create a want artificially, and it catches on like a virus. People want diamond rings because other people want them, but they rationalise it by saying “it shows that my partner loves me”.

Michael Zhang:

Russian photographer Andrew Osokin is a master of winter macro photography. His photo collection is chock full of gorgeous super-close-up photographs of insects, flowers, snow, and frost. Among his most impressive shots are photographs of individual snowflakes that have fallen upon the ground and are in the process of melting away. The shots are so detailed and so perfectly framed that you might suspect them of being computer-generated fabrications.

They’re not though. The images were all captured using a Nikon D80 or Nikon D90 DSLR and a 60mm or 90mm macro lens.

Daniel Kahenman:

The question becomes, is it possible to set up a system for learning from history that’s not simply programmed to avoid the most recent mistake in a very simple, mechanistic fashion? Is it possible to set up a system for learning from history that actually learns in our sophisticated way that manages to bring down both false positive and false negatives to some degree? That’s a big question mark.

Nobody has really systematically addressed that question until IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, sponsored this particular project, which is very, very ambitious in scale. It’s an attempt to address the question of whether you can push political forecasting closer to what philosophers might call an optimal forecasting frontier. That an optimal forecasting frontier is a frontier along which you just can’t get any better.

PHILIP E. TETLOCK is Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (School of Arts and Sciences and Wharton School). He is author of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? which describes a twenty-year study in which 284 experts in many fields, including government officials, professors, and journalists and ranging from Marxists to free-marketeers, were asked to make 28,000 predictions about the future. He found they were only slightly more accurate than chance, and worse than simple extrapolation algorithms. The book has received many awards, including the 2006 Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Political Science Association and the 2008 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

God’s handiwork on a pleasant afternoon.

The Economist:

WHEN aliens seize and torture Dr McCoy in “The Empath”, an episode of the science-fiction series “Star Trek”, Captain Kirk and Mr Spock rush to his aid. They are able to assess his condition in seconds with the help of a medical tricorder—a hand-held computer with a detachable sensor that is normally used by Dr McCoy himself to diagnose others. A quick scan with the tricorder indicates that he suffers from “severe heart damage; signs of congestion in both lungs; evidence of massive circulatory collapse”.

Along with teleportation, speech-driven computers and hand-held wireless communicators that flip open, the medical tricorder was one of many imaginary future technologies featured in “Star Trek”. Ever since, researchers have dreamed of developing a hand-held medical scanner that can take readings from a patient and then diagnose various conditions. Now, nearly five decades after “Star Trek” made its debut in 1966, the dream is finally edging closer to reality.

The Economist:

LETTUCE is California’s main vegetable crop. The state grew $1.6 billion-worth of the leafy plant in 2010 and accounts for more than 70% of all lettuce grown in America—itself the world’s second-biggest exporter of the stuff. It is a fiddly business. As well as having to be fertilised and weeded, lettuce must also be “thinned” so that good plants do not grow too close to each other, inhibiting growth. Much of this is still done by hand. Labourers, who tend to be paid per acre, not per hour, have little incentive to pay close attention to what they pull from the ground, often leading to unnecessary waste.

Enter Lettuce Bot, the brainchild of two Stanford-trained engineers, Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden. Their diligent robotic labourer, pulled behind a tractor, starts by taking pictures of passing plants. Computer-vision algorithms devised by Mr Redden compare these to a database of more than a million images, taken from different angles against different backdrops of soil and other plants, that he and Mr Heraud have amassed from their visits to lettuce farms. A simple shield blocks out the Californian sun to prevent odd shading from confounding the software.

Tim Iacono:

I’ve about had it with how giddy a large portion of the U.S. population has become about rising home prices.

Don’t get me wrong, when first thinking about this, I was about as happy as anyone else to learn that property values are now rising sharply again since, after renting for six years, my wife and I finally bought a house about two years ago. So, we stand to benefit as much as anyone else.

But, when you look at what’s driving home prices higher and how unnatural and unsustainable those factors are, suddenly the headlines sound more ominous than optimistic.

Dan Neil:

IN MY CONTINUING war on U.S. customary units of weights and measures, I would like to point out that, on Porsche’s U.S. website, the fuel-injection pressure of the Cayenne Diesel is listed as 29,007 pounds per square inch.

The Porsche Cayenne Diesel SUV is incredibly tight and well-balanced. But should you buy one? Dan Neil give us his answer on The News Hub. Photo: Porsche.

Really? Is that the number the people at Robert Bosch had in mind when they were modeling the V6’s common-rail, direct-injection fuel system? Yah, neunundzwanzig tausend…und sieben! Why don’t we join the civilized world and call that 200 megapascals, or the elegantly convertible 2,000 bar? What’s with the drams per hectare?

Metric, people. Get with the program.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Close your eyes and try to imagine your future surroundings in, say, five, 10 or 25 years. Odds are your imagination will produce new things in it, things we call innovation, improvements, killer technologies and other inelegant and hackneyed words from the business jargon. These common concepts concerning innovation, we will see, are not just offensive aesthetically, but they are nonsense both empirically and philosophically.

Why? Odds are that your imagination will be adding things to the present world. I am sorry, but this approach is exactly backward: the way to do it rigorously is to take away from the future, reduce from it, simply, things that do not belong to the coming times.

I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge — something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability — with all due respect to your imagination.

Michael J De la Merced:

Ms. Meeker says that the country’s expenses — think programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — outstripped revenue by 56 percent. That compares with a difference, or what she calls net margin, of just 7 percent 15 years ago. And tax breaks exceeded $1 trillion last year, which she argues accounted for 83 percent of the deficit in cash flow.

Ms. Meeker adds a few more points to her latest USA Inc. presentation as well. She cites a Pew Research Center poll from December that showed that 49 percent of adults aged 18 years to 29 years viewed socialism favorably. And she points out that the United States tax code contains 859 times more words than the Constitution.