Sublime

A closer look shows that the hierarchies are constructed on a “building block” principle: subsystems at each level of the hierarchy are constructed by combinations of small numbers of subsystems from the next lower level.

The uncertainty in question will not be an accident of our circumstances — it will be entirely deliberate. We want to tempt others to engage in economic behavior, the output of which is uncertain, at the opportunity cost of behavior that is presumably much more certain. In effect, we are buying uncertainty with certainty.

Ockham wrote that “a plurality is not to be posited without necessity”—essentially that we should prefer the simplest explanation with the fewest moving parts.2,3 They are easier to falsify, easier to understand, and generally more likely to be correct.

observations alone can never rule out the theory that the Earth is enclosed in a giant planetarium showing us a simulation of a heliocentric solar system; and that outside the planetarium there is anything you like, or nothing at all. Admittedly, to account for present-day observations the planetarium would also have to redirect our radar and laser

“Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do,” von Neumann wrote. “And that is what games are about in my theory.”

The more we understand the human mind in causal terms, the harder it becomes to draw a distinction between cases like 4 and 5.