Jim's Blog

In “the Prince”, Machiavelli observed:

fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.

Observe that Machiavelli is familiar with what we now call game, and takes for granted that his audience is familiar. (more…)

Suppose group A and group B differ in mean and distribution in some desirable or undesirable quality. Chances are that there is a lot of overlap in the middle, but when you select the very best, perhaps for some prestigious and well paid job, and the very worst, perhaps to lock them up and get them off the streets, the bell curve, the normal distribution, implies not much overlap. Because not much overlap, if the state enforces affirmative action there will be very little overlap between those who earned the prestigious job, and those affirmative actioned into the prestigious job. Most of the affirmative action job holders, on casual inspection seemingly all of them, will be incapable of fulfilling the normal requirements of the job. (For a notorious recent example, female firefighters during the 9/11 fire.) (more…)

Mark Duggan’s gun was not fired, and before his death, he expected to be murdered. This suggests that his family’s account of his killing is true – that he was not killed in an exchange of fire, but was murdered by police, in which case the attacks on police that started these riots were legitimate, no matter how illegitimate the ensuing arson, looting, and random racist assaults.
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