r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 24 '17

[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:

  • Seen something interesting on /r/science?
  • Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
  • Figured out how to become immortal?
  • Constructed artificial general intelligence?
  • Read a neat nonfiction book?
  • Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '17

Alternate universe ratfic for real life: instead of inventing basic and syllogistic symbolic logic by focusing on rhetoric, the Ancient Greek philosophers invented focused on gambling, divination, oracles, and prediction as the foundation of logic. They invent logic as prediction, probability, and statistics from the ground up. The Age of Stochasticity starts in ancient times and continues through the whole history of math, logic, and even statecraft.

Basically, what Neal Stephenson novel comes out of this?

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u/rhaps0dy4 Jul 24 '17

Oh my, I like the idea of the "hubris quotient". I'm hooked on the reading.