… in real life it is often possible to make a statistical guess as to how much longer the game is likely to last. This assessment may become an important part of strategy…

… Each player can be expected to behave as if he possessed a continuously updated estimate of how long the game is likely to go on. The longer his estimate, the more he will play according to the mathematician’s expectations for the true iterated game: in other words, the nicer, more forgiving, less envious he will be. The shorter his estimate of the future of the game, the more he will be inclined to play according to the mathematician’s expectations for the one-off game: the nastier, and less forgiving will he be.

Karma plays out in the same medium again and again – like a pawn which marches off the end of the board and re-emerges, perhaps in a different form, back at square one of the same game. Contrast this with other theologies in which a pawn goes off the “Earth” board to a different game forever. The Pascal argument surfaces, and given the infinity of time you are expected to spend in the afterlife, it pays to optimize your chances for the one-shot decision point which determines whether you score a harp or a red-hot trident up the backside for the rest of forever. For expansionist reasons, many religions have an amnesty scheme where all you need to do is sign on the dotted line of sincere belief and repentance and any negative score you have accumulated is reset, plus you get a ticket to harpdom. A smart player can defect for most of his duration on the earth board, gaining hugely in “material” score, and signing up for the Prodigal Son program just before he’s due to exit to the next board.

One of these schemes has an elegance born of simplicity and symmetry, and leads to “good” behaviour. The other can lead to highly defective behaviour against fellow humans – some of it religiously endorsed – without diminishing anticipation of the eternal raisin-filled desserts of paradise.

there is a similar probability thing in karma — recall Pascal’s clever computation, where he said even if there is only a small probability of god/heaven/hell being true, it pays to be religious because the upside/downside are so extreme compared to the neutral outcome of atheism.

so i think your argument can actually be made completely mathematical. what is the probability that grandpa will come back and haunt me as a ghost? or as a snake in next-life that bites me? if it is non-zero in a bayesian sense, it makes sense to do ancestor worship, take care of elders etc.

and you’d keep ‘history’ and ‘geography’ as subjects in the post-historical/post-geographic age. tchh tchh

Yup, objective truth gets in the way of too many things for it to be a priority

But I’m pretty sure that a combination of trusted computing, signed code, ubiquitous cellphone-cameras, high speed wireless networks will unfold a goldfish bowl dystopia soon. You won’t be able to get car insurance without installing one of those things.

“Automatic editors” are going to be needed to analyze and index the insane amounts of video – all that machine vision research is getting another killer use case. You don’t need to keep the raw data around – take a leaf from the brain and just compress it to stick figures with labels.

the interesting thing about this is that any lossy compression scheme is an implicit model of reality, and like all models, is optimized for particular purposes. we seem to optimize for survivability and happiness, in that order. notions of truth are probably 8th in priority or something.

there was that guy, forget his name, who actually tried to become cybernetic by carrying cameras around all day and logging his life. DARPA sponsored a lifelog project which caused an outcry and was dropped. and now we have all those stream mashups allowing you to do close to that; feeding your life into facebook.

editing is the need of the day of course, but I think wisdom-of-crowds editing works reasonably well as a first-pass filter.

I wrote shell-wrappers around bc that I call “hex” and “dec” to do the obvious!

Yeah, I never liked units either – Google wins hands down there.

[tubelite@socket ~]$ units
2084 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

[see? it's already trying to intimidate you]

You have: 58 f
You want: c
conformability error
5.8e-14
2.9979246e+08 m / s

Doesn’t it sound like Marvin the robot? “Brain the size of a planet, and they want me to convert F to C, whatever that means”.