RE: Re:

Only go to Greece if you feel well , I just had to send my plane to bring another lefty friend back from Athens to see a Jew doctor in New York .

Bad news. We decided not to go. I was invited to talk at the Parliament, but what can one say? That aside, they've got plenty of people giving them bad advice.

bad for them , good for you. no need to have only one currency, its old fashioned. . you are of course welcome to use apt in new york with your new leisure time, or visit new Mexico again.

ants find the shortest route to food, by trying many and discarding what doesn't work, no algorithm. , no input or output , only a goal. . sounds closer to our probem

ants and evolution work by trying things and finding the best solution. math and physics works by algorithms. Im suggesting that maybe just as a child sends out many connections and then discards the unused might be a better template for biological thinking.

What you suggest is very much the model that has been current in the behavioral sciences for many years. It has a record of colossal failure, and for good reasons, I think. It's disproven, but keeps coming back, most recently with Big Data illusions.

A child doesn't grow arms and legs rather than wings, or a mammalian vs insect visual system, the way an ant searches for food. Rather, the path of development is sharply restricted (and evolution follows constraints too). Acquisition of language (and other cognitive achievements) seems very much like physical growth.

Highly contentious in the field, but in my opinion that's a comment on the failures of the field.

the mathematical model. is quite beautiful, though the basic rules are simple , once they have run over and over again, and produced a result you cannot tease them out by any form of reductionism. or algorithm, just like the series 7- 21-37... cannot be found by alogrithm, it is simply the difference of cubes, . Have you written about the iran deal?

Neat indeed.

I’m writing about the Iran deal. So far have only sent a form paragraph in response to requests. Below.

Noam

On Iran, as usual, I'm a gloomy contrarian. I'm glad the treaty was signed, and it's kind of fun to watch the Republican lunatics shrieking hysterically as they try to kill it (as they may). And Israeli hypocrisy has gone well beyond being comical. But in fact the whole thing is farcical, in my opinon. In the US, Iran is "the greatest threat to world peace", intoned constantly from on high, in the media, everywhere. There is also such a thing as world opinion, as measured by such ultra-radicals as Gallup. It turns out that the greatest threat to world peace is the US, by a very wide margin, no one else even close, and Iran barely mentioned. The American population is protected from these unwanted facts by the Free Press: not reported. There is an organization called US intelligence. They brief Congress regularly on the international security situation, all quite public. On Iran, they point out that it has very limited military power, even by regional standards (a small fraction of Saudi Arabia, for example). Its strategic doctrine is defensive. If — a big If — it has plans for nuclear weapons, that would be part of its deterrent strategy. Now who would be opposed to Iran having a deterrent strategy? Answer is clear: the rogue states that rampage violently in the region and don't want any impediment: the US and Israel, also lesser ones like UK and France. One simple way to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons would be to establish a nuclear-weapons free zone in the region, as has been done elsewhere (over US objections). That's been advocated by the Arab states for 20 years, with very wide global support, including Iran. It comes up regularly at the 5-year review meetings of the Nonproliferation Treaty, at the UN, again a few months ago, when, again, it was blocked by the US to protect its Israeli client, which has a huge nuclear weapons arsenal and wants to keep it. Again, the population is protected from such facts by the Free Press (though in this case there are some fringe exceptions, and of course the Arms Control literature). Same with the rest of the litany. Reading the US and UK press is like living in some lunatic asylum. I'm wondering whether to write about it — again; have done so repeatedly. It's like talking to a wall. Iran has an awful government, though by the standards of such US allies as Saudi Arabia, it's practically heaven.

Nevertheless, better to have the treaty than not to, given the nature of the asylum.

Noam