Computer Scientists

"[T]he continuity of tradition from Plymouth Rock to the United Nations is quite unmistakable."

"Academic politics is a murky and brutal game, and a small finger on the scales can steer it quite effectively, especially over time."

"[R]evenue-maximizing government is not a medieval atrocity from the past, but a permanent feature of human history whose rare exceptions are unstable and undesirable."

"The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government."

"A good way to find the most powerful people in the US is to find the most responsible people. No one in the US is scheming for power. A lot of them seem to be working for change. No one in the US is brainwashing the masses. A lot of them seem to be educating the public. No one in the US is ruling the world. A lot of them seem to be making global policies."

"[U]niversal faith in progress is evidence for, not against, decline."

"In fact, rationalism is to reason as scientism is to science."

"An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today."

"The genius of New Deal "liberal democracy" is that while it's somewhat liberal, it's not at all democratic. It is in fact designed specifically to resist democracy. The combination of this design with a civic creed that assigns unlimited positive connotations to the word democracy is simply brilliant. We may despise it, but we have to admire it."

"[T]he modern world has largely replaced religion, defined as the veneration of paranormal beings, with idealism, defined as the veneration of mysterious universal principles."

"I can't imagine counting the number of times I've heard someone say "we should…" when what they really mean is "the government should…"."

"All decent, reasonable men are horrified by the idea that the government might control the press. None of them seem concerned at all that the press might control the government."

"[E]very kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics", which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement."

"That's always the trouble with history. It always looks like it's over. But it never is."

"[T]he hardest part of thinking clearly is recognizing false assumptions that are universally shared."

"There is no institution to which one can go in order to receive a sound paleoconservative education. Most of the people in the idea trade would simply deny that such a thing exists. Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant."

"Limited government is a recipe for corrupting the judiciary."

"The essential idea of leftism is that the world should be governed by scholars."

"Did you ever wonder why nationalism seemed so similar, right down to the names of the parties in, say, Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam? What did Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam have in common? Certainly nothing that could be described as Algerian, Indonesian, or Vietnamese. Oh, no. What they had in common was that they all had friends—or, more precisely, sponsors—at Harvard."

"I hope you can agree that the Harvard faculty in 2007 by and large believes in human equality, social justice, world peace, and community leadership, that the faculty of the same institution held much the same beliefs in 1957, 1907, 1857, and 1807, and that in any of these years they would have described these views as the absolute cynosure of Christianity. Perhaps I am just naturally suspicious, but it strains my credulity slightly to believe that sometime in 1969, the very same beliefs were rederived from pure reason and universal ethics, whose concurrence with the New Testament is remarkable to say the least."

"Since the ideal of limited government—that is, the idea that sovereignty cannot be the rightful property of anyone, individual, family, or corporation—has become general, we have seen an extraordinary level of violence, which appears to be connected to the question of who should control and receive the revenues of sovereignty."

"Judea Pearl's work has transformed artificial intelligence (AI) by creating a representational and computational foundation for the processing of information under uncertainty. Pearl's work went beyond both the logic-based theoretical orientation of AI and its rule-based technology for expert systems. He identified uncertainty as a core problem faced by intelligent systems and developed an algorithmic interpretation of probability theory as an effective foundation for the representation and acquisition of knowledge."

"An event recognised as responsible for the production of a certain outcome... Human intuition is extremely keen in detecting and ascertaining this type of causation and hence is considered the key to construct explanations... and the ultimate criterion (known as “cause in fact”) for determining legal responsibility. Clearly, actual causation requires information beyond that of necessity and sufficiency: the actual process mediating between the cause and the effect must enter into consideration."

"Mr. Holmes receives a telephone call from his neighbor Dr. Watson who states that he hears the sound of a burglar alarm from the direction of Mr. Holmes' house. While preparing to rush home, Mr. Holmes recalls that Dr. Watson is known to be a tasteless practical joker..."

"When loops are present, the network is no longer singly connected and local propagation schemes will invariably run into trouble.. If we ignore the existence of loops and permit the nodes to continue communicating with each other as if the network were singly connected, messages may circulate indefinitely around the loops and process may not converges to a stable equilibrium... Such oscillations do not normally occur in probabilistic networks... which tend to bring all messages to some stable equilibrium as time goes on. However, this asymptotic equilibrium is not coherent, in the sense that it does not represent the posterior probabilities of all nodes of the network."

"Haavelmo was the first to recognize the capacity of economic models to guide policies. This paper describes some of the barriers that Haavelmo’s ideas have had (and still have) to overcome, and lays out a logical framework that has evolved from Haavelmo’s insight and matured into a coherent and comprehensive account of the relationships between theory, data and policy questions. The mathematical tools that emerge from this framework now enable investigators to answer complex policy and counterfactual questions using simple routines, some by mere inspection of the model’s structure."

"The research questions that motivate most quantitative studies in the health, social and behavioral sciences are not statistical but causal in nature. For example, what is the efficacy of a given drug in a given population? Whether data can prove an employer guilty of hiring discrimination? What fraction of past crimes could have been avoided by a given policy? What was the cause of death of a given individual, in a specific incident? These are causal questions because they require some knowledge of the data-generating process; they cannot be computed from the data alone."

"Traditional statistics is strong in devising ways of describing data and inferring distributional parameters from sample. Causal inference requires two additional ingredients: a science-friendly language for articulating causal knowledge, and a mathematical machinery for processing that knowledge, combining it with data and drawing new causal conclusions about a phenomenon."

"(Simpson 1951; Blyth 1972), first encountered by Pearson in 1899 (Aldrich 1995), refers to the phenomenon whereby an event C increases the probability of E in a given population p and, at the same time, decreases the probability of E in every subpopulation of p."

"[is] a term coined in Pearl (1985) to emphasize three aspects: (1) the subjective nature of the input information; (2) the reliance on Bayes' conditioning as the basis of updating information; (3) the distinction between causal and evidential models of reasoning, a distinction that underscores Thomas Bayes' paper of 1763,"

"A quantity Q(M) is identifiable, given a set of assumptions A, iffor any two models M1 and M2 that satisfy A, we have"

"Anu Garg triggers the kind of passionate reaction that actors, authors and memoirists would die for."

"Garg works in the great tradition of Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis... Garg, however, is more fun."

"Only Anu Garg, the founder of Wordsmith.org, can make word facts this much fun."

"thumb|People travel. Words travel. People settle in new lands and so do words. Did I hear someone say they wanted to make walls, close off people from one another? Here’s to more travel, more mixing, more migration, more import and export, and more sweetness in our lives!People travel. Words travel. People settle in new lands and so do words. Did I hear someone say they wanted to make walls, close off people from one another? Here’s to more travel, more mixing, more migration, more import and export, and more sweetness in our lives!"

"AWADies will be familiar with Anu Garg's refreshing approach to words: words are fun and they have fascinating histories."

"The verb "fuck" has been a part of the language since at least early 1500s. The actual practice, far longer. So, no need to be embarrassed of either."

"Q: What language is not written in French? A: Sanskrit. In French, it's known as sanskrit or sanscrit, which you can interpret as sans (without) + écrit (written) https://www.facebook.com/wordsmithorg/posts/10157813707206840"

"When life gives you lemons make melons."

"Like a human being, each word has a story. To understand a word, we need to learn where it was born, what paths it took to reach where it is today and how it has changed along the way."

"Do the best job I can, not hurt our fellow beings on this planet, that's my religion."

"Scientifically speaking, an overweight person is more attractive than a skinny one. Newton's Law of Gravitation."

"Overall, the universe's apostrophe store stays in balance. It seems our linguistic world was intelligently designed -- for every gratuitous apostrophe there's an instance where it's omitted."

"All the life's wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie."

"Eyes are verbs that conjugate the emotions."

"If you torture words enough, they'll confess to anything."

"A right word is the most direct route between two minds."

"[T]hat's how a language grows. Old words die - or take on a new life. New words appear. Language wordstock is replenished, refreshed, and the language remains vibrant and serviceable, ready to describe new concepts, ideas, and objects. Many language purists object to this way of growth. But we have to remember that just as yesterday's liberal is often tomorrow's conservative, in many cases, what was considered slang in the past, eventually acquires respectability."

"The best way to enrich vocabulary is organically, by coming across words in their natural habitat, taking the time to learn about them, their histories, and making lifelong friends with them."

"Browsing the OED is the idea of a perfect day for me."