Take a Break

"This engine screams out loud

Centipede gonna crawl westbound

So I don't even make a sound

Cause it's gonna sting me when I leave this town

All the people in the street

That I'll never get to meet

If these tracks don't bend somehow

And I got no time

That I got to get to

Where I don't need to be

So I

I need this

Old train to breakdown

Oh please just

Let me please breakdown

I need this

Old train to breakdown

Oh please just

Let me please breakdown

I wanna break on down

But I cant stop now

Let me break on down

But you cant stop nothing

If you got no control

Of the thoughts in your mind

That you kept in, you know

You don't know nothing"

- Jack Johnson, Breakdown

The beginning and the end are mysteries. The journey between is relentless. Sometimes, yes.

(Picture credit: Voices Inside My Head http://fredcheung.blogspot.com/2012/04/bernard.html)

A New Uncertainty Principal

People who slightly and frequently adjust their estimates about how likely something is to happen, based on new information, are much more likely to end up calling events correctly than are people who don't change their mind ever or who flip-flop more dramatically.

 - Zack Beauchamp, This study tried to improve our ability to predict major geopolitical events. It worked. (Vox)

Having an open mind means somebody is always trying to put things inside it. Some things that get inside change your mind. Now a study has proved that being rigidly certain of everything – of anything – makes a person less able to predict major world events.  By which I mean, correctly predict important shit.

Philip Tetlock  one of the scientists conducting the study,  said, "I would say that if you have a tool that can increase the accuracy of probability estimates — by 30, 40, 50, 60 percent— as much as has been demonstrated in the IARPA tournaments, it's worth investing many millions of dollars even to reduce, to a small degree, the probability of multitrillion-dollar mistakes."

So changing your mind about stuff is a good thing. Not to mention, having decent intelligence (in both the predictive and intellectual sense) would probably save lives.