The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

We're instinctive animals. We act in accordance to what we feel: anger, happiness, compassion, pain. Your body is an evolution-optimized "soft machine"  whose actions can be traced and explained by specific emotions.  You are cold? You get a blanket. The pain your nerves communicate to your brain prompts you to act and look for warmth. You're angry because somebody flipped you off on your commute to work? Your return the gesture, or even escalate by cutting him/her off at the first chance.   Emotion begets actions. We are slaves to the whims of our feelings. Entire religions and eastern traditions are built around the concept of achieving control over what we feel and emote. Nobel prizes are given to those who invent  new branches of knowledge which merge psychology and economics (“behavioral economics”), based on the idea that our emotions makes us act stupidly.  This is evidently a huge blind spot in all of us. A vulnerability that's been exploite...

It finally ended. The year we all will never forget won't be with us any longer. Which means nothing, really, since 2020 didn't really bring us all the bad stuff we suffered through the last 12 months. In an effort to unload all of our frustrations about the things we would like to have happened differently this year, we are going to say " fuck you 2020 ", " good riddance ", " 2020, you will not be missed " etc. etc., but the reality is that calendars are nothing more than arbitrary cutoffs we agreed upon simply because we needed to keep track of time. This planet happens to circle our star once every 365 days, so we had to start counting one day out of those 365. That we started counting the terrestrial journey around the sun 6 days after winter solstice is as random as the reason why The Mona Lisa is the most admired work of art in human history --a guy made it famous (because he stole it), and then enough people agreed it was beautiful (why, I d...

We are nothing more than little ants fighting disorder in our immediate environment living in a universe trending towards chaos. From our insignificant, unilateral (human) viewpoint, we are always striving to minimize surprises. That's the brain evolution gifted us . And when surprises appear, we learn , hoping to apply what's learned in our next interaction with our environment, so we hopefully survive. Ok, maybe not "we" , but our genes, because we're really just the vehicle genes use to perpetuate themselves into posterity.  If only us little ants' fight was costless. Every time we strive to reduce disorder locally (reduce entropy), and rearrange our environment so that it's less hostile to us, we actually increase disorder (entropy) in the overall universe. When we chop down forests to dedicate that land for human crops, and we reduce the threat of going hungry (reducing entropy from humans' perspective), we actually increase entropy at the planet...

Nobody can really  take credit for having solved a problem that never happened. Any attempt at it drags you into the realm of non-existent hypotheticals and becomes moot the moment you open your mouth. This is the position leaders around the world find themselves in when trying to fight this pandemic. It doesn't matter how informed, intelligent, prescient our leaders might (or might not) be, they face the same fog of uncertainty when trying to predict the future while making decisions to fix a problem this complex. For better and worse, we're equipped with minds that can only draw on history to construct patterns when trying to face the future. And in a Bayesian dance , all we can aspire to do is to  tinker with our course of action as that fog of uncertainty chooses to spit the next piece of evidence at us. There is no other way. Leaders (simple humans* that they are) fall prey to the same  Law of Small Numbers ; forced to take action in the face of clouded, sm...

I've been told that I am a negative person. And of course, I don't think I am. My motivated reasoning kicks in and immediately tells me that I can't be that negative . But then I stop to think about it and realize that I might be,  after all . Always looking at the phone for the news-break --which are generally negative. Sharing the latest story about a potential pandemic , or about locust swarms blanketing africa , or about the potential WWIII-triggering assassination of an Iranian Commander . Or about the Puerto Rico earth-quake . Reflecting upon that, I've settled upon a couple of ideas. Yes, I pay more attention to the negative stuff. And I share it as soon as I can (at least the significant parts). But I don't think that makes me negative . I think that makes me human. I am, just like everyone else, equipped with a bunch of mental quirks that make me (and you) gravitate towards anything threatening around you. When we are reminded of all the progress that ...

You could say that parasites are evil creatures. They're selfish, manipulative, and insidious. When they infect a host, they hope they don't kill it while they live within (since killing the host would mean killing itself). In that sense, parasites are tangentially symbiotic with the living things they infect. They existentially need a propagator --a host to help them spread themselves as efficiently as possible. Parasites can even take reign of the infected being's behavior for their own benefit: Sneezing is the common cold virus' effective way to propagate itself. Cuddling is the way an infectious virus makes kids look for closeness, so the infection jumps easily to the next host. The Gordian worm manipulates the brain of an infected cricket into jumping into water in order for the worm to mate. We rarely stop to think about this, but interwoven ideas (Narratives) are parasitic, evil body-less "creatures" too. Like parasites, Narratives can't surviv...