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Essential for astronomical calculations, like forecasting the paths of Jupiter and Venus. A daily brief of "omens" was submitted to the Assyrian King at breakfa

Essential for astronomical calculations, like forecasting the paths of Jupiter and Venus. A daily brief of "omens" was submitted to the Assyrian King at breakfast. Has anything changed in modern day? I watch the weather and traffic at 6am and likewise predict how "long and glorious my reign shall live" ;)

colechristensen 4y ago
Romans relied on a few different omens for a lot of things which reduced to injecting randomness into a lot of decision making. I wonder if such things would be valuable to add back to modern life… roll dice to determine which tickets to add to the next sprint, legislatures have to flip a coin to trigger a floor vote for a piece of contentious legislation, that kind of thing.
- npongratz 4y ago
  It could be sold as a meatspace chaos monkey.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  I think that makes sense. If you cannot be very sure of actual evidence why rely on it anyway? But randomness might mean that every time you use the result you learn something, at least you would learn whether your rule-based default value for the control variable is systematically wrong and tilted to one direction or another.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    That goes along with my thinking. Some things are obvious but when you move away from the top topic or two you’ll always have a long list of things where it’s not so clear which should be done next, and there’s plenty which is always important to do but never the most important thing. A bit of randomness injected into that process whether you’re dealing with software tickets, national legislation, or household chores might just lead to better outcomes than relying on the judgement of a few people without enough information to make nonarbitrary decisions and might have bad biases which lead to things getting overprioritized or neglected.
  - PebblesRox 4y ago
    I think companies could test their interview process this way. Fill some positions by choosing from the candidate pool at random (there could be a baseline filter to ensure a minimum level of competence) and compare the random hires with the regular hires to see how much of a difference the interview process really makes.
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      Fascinating idea. Do you know of a company that’s done this? Or maybe planning to do this?
      - PebblesRox 4y ago
        No, it's just a half-baked idea I've had after reading people's arguments for and against various interviewing approaches.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      We’re more or less hiring at “pass the baseline level of competence” and I don’t think we’re alone.
    - debatem1 4y ago
      I've long advocated for building a candidate pool for both hires and promos from a low baseline (with the option to opt out for promo), then hire/promote randomly out of that pool. Then fire/demote based on demonstrated incompetence. The important thing isn't that you promote the best worker; the key is that it isn't possible for the ambitious-but-incompetent to game their way up.
    - taneq 4y ago
      Wasn’t there some recent research that showed that hiring randomly actually works better on average? Edit: Wait, that was promoting.
- rhcom2 4y ago
  > Alectriomancy – fortune-telling with chickens https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/alectriomancy-fortune-telling-with-chickens/ https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/alectriomancy-fort...
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Sortilege is a good thing. Right now we have an ostensibly democratic system where elected representatives take part in another election among themselves about which one of them gets to have pre-emptive veto power over all legislative proposals for 2-6 years (in the US).
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    As I noted upstream, sortition's a pretty fascinating concept. A few years ago I'd thought that the US Supreme Court might benefit by both expansion and selecting by lot the judicial panel for any given case. This would throw far more uncertainty into the outcome of any given Supreme Court case, as well as the capacity to throw the court in the benefit of one party or the other for years at a time. That's been proposed by others. Another possibility might be to apply a similar approach to legislation, with an expanded Congress closer to the 30,000:1 constituent to representative ratio initially in the US Constitution rather than the 616,000:1 ratio presently in place. That would result in a House of 11,000 members, however. (I'm willing to accept that this might prove infeasible, though I'd still like to see approaches enabling greater direct representation.) What if, as with the Supreme Court reform proposal, legislative votes were based on a subset of representatives, again allocated by lot from amongst members? Again, though outcomes would over time average to partisan representation, any given vote might, or might not, favour the majority party. One possible consequence: given the impossibility of guaranteeing a known outcome in votes, legislation might be written to more broadly consider overall views. This could avoid exremes, though it's worth noting that extremes gave rise to both highly discriminatory and civil-rights-reform practices. Some extremes seem less bad than others. There's also the probable outcome that the locus of control would shift elsewhere. I'd still like to see some discussion of such concepts.
- vgel 4y ago
  Athenian democracy worked this way--you had to opt-in to the candidate pool, but then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool. (Also, if people are interested in randomness in antique decision making, me & my wife made a simulator of an ancient lot oracle unearthed in modern Turkey: https://sortesalearum.com https://sortesalearum.com)
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    > then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool The sad thing is, I feel that this method may actually produce better results than whatever popularity voting schemes we're currently using.
- lolive 4y ago
  Double-Face for president !
- lolive 4y ago
  Is the YiKing still something relevant, in the chinese culture, for decision-making [with a bit of randomness included]?
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Numerous cultures did, and do, do that. (It's somewhat enshrined in modern-day RNGs used in simulation and forecasting models.) Michael Schulson's 2014 Aeon essay, "How to Choose" remains at the top of my best reads of the past decade: ... It makes sense that it should have taken Dove some 15 years to realise that randomness could be an asset. As moderns, we take it for granted that the best decisions stem from a process of empirical analysis and informed choice, with a clear goal in mind. That kind of decision-making, at least in theory, undergirds the ways that we choose political leaders, play the stock market, and select candidates for schools and jobs. It also shapes the way in which we critique the rituals and superstitions of others. But, as the Kantu’ illustrate, there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit. ... <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...> Examples include swidden farmers in New Guinea, China's I Ching, the Athenian Greek elections (more a lottery than today's FPTP precise-count balloting), Renaissance Italy's Doges, and contemporary college admissions, with references for further reading.
rolph 4y ago
if you could predict when certain phenomenon will occur, then act as if you are somehow in control of these things, you can spin up public perceptions of god-hood
- paulcole 4y ago
  Just wait until your enemies spin up public perceptions of your witch-hood.
  - rolph 4y ago
    im thinking in the context of pre-judeo christian society. these tablets are close to 4000 years old. being possesed by gods was an in thing, a believe demons were a prechristian idea as well, so if witch, and demon could be interchanged somehow, i think that fits the era.
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  Exactly, especially when you announce it to your subjects in large heavily incensed halls.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    I can think of a few things you might be implying with your wording but none of them make much sense in context.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      Anyone wanna fill me in? If it wasn’t clear, I was implying I’d like to be able to understand the implications of what I’m reading.
      - noisy_boy 4y ago
        If I had to take a guess: the scene being depicted in the comment could apply to any powerful king/priest of the past - imagine halls full of incense and chanting creating a feeling of mass hypnosis/hysteria (possibly intensified with consumption of psychedelics) and the booming voice of the king/priest proclaims their power over celestial objects - and it comes true due to normal celestial events/eclipses!
brightball 4y ago
I will treat my daily news and weather this way from now on.
arthurcolle 4y ago
Trader risk meeting in Assyria, basically
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nly 4y ago
The king likely didn't get up at 6am
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  We have plenty of records from other societies indicating how absolute rulers did and didn't schedule their days. A king has a potentially limitless amount of stuff to do and also the power to set his own schedule as well as servants to help him stick to it. Whether he slept a lot or a little and whether his schedule was biased early or late was almost certainly a matter of personal preference and convenience. An absolute ruler also has to consider the signal being sent. Being awake and dressed in time to attend morning colors with regularity sends a message that a ruler might deem worth the effort to send.
im3w1l 4y ago
I think it's absolutely amazing that the astronomy inspired the arts that would, thousands of years later, allow us to go to space.

colechristensen 4y ago

Romans relied on a few different omens for a lot of things which reduced to injecting randomness into a lot of decision making. I wonder if such things would be valuable to add back to modern life… roll dice to determine which tickets to add to the next sprint, legislatures have to flip a coin to trigger a floor vote for a piece of contentious legislation, that kind of thing.

npongratz 4y ago
It could be sold as a meatspace chaos monkey.
galaxyLogic 4y ago
I think that makes sense. If you cannot be very sure of actual evidence why rely on it anyway? But randomness might mean that every time you use the result you learn something, at least you would learn whether your rule-based default value for the control variable is systematically wrong and tilted to one direction or another.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  That goes along with my thinking. Some things are obvious but when you move away from the top topic or two you’ll always have a long list of things where it’s not so clear which should be done next, and there’s plenty which is always important to do but never the most important thing. A bit of randomness injected into that process whether you’re dealing with software tickets, national legislation, or household chores might just lead to better outcomes than relying on the judgement of a few people without enough information to make nonarbitrary decisions and might have bad biases which lead to things getting overprioritized or neglected.
- PebblesRox 4y ago
  I think companies could test their interview process this way. Fill some positions by choosing from the candidate pool at random (there could be a baseline filter to ensure a minimum level of competence) and compare the random hires with the regular hires to see how much of a difference the interview process really makes.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Fascinating idea. Do you know of a company that’s done this? Or maybe planning to do this?
    - PebblesRox 4y ago
      No, it's just a half-baked idea I've had after reading people's arguments for and against various interviewing approaches.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    We’re more or less hiring at “pass the baseline level of competence” and I don’t think we’re alone.
  - debatem1 4y ago
    I've long advocated for building a candidate pool for both hires and promos from a low baseline (with the option to opt out for promo), then hire/promote randomly out of that pool. Then fire/demote based on demonstrated incompetence. The important thing isn't that you promote the best worker; the key is that it isn't possible for the ambitious-but-incompetent to game their way up.
  - taneq 4y ago
    Wasn’t there some recent research that showed that hiring randomly actually works better on average? Edit: Wait, that was promoting.
rhcom2 4y ago
> Alectriomancy – fortune-telling with chickens https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/alectriomancy-fortune-telling-with-chickens/ https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/alectriomancy-fort...
anigbrowl 4y ago
Sortilege is a good thing. Right now we have an ostensibly democratic system where elected representatives take part in another election among themselves about which one of them gets to have pre-emptive veto power over all legislative proposals for 2-6 years (in the US).
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  As I noted upstream, sortition's a pretty fascinating concept. A few years ago I'd thought that the US Supreme Court might benefit by both expansion and selecting by lot the judicial panel for any given case. This would throw far more uncertainty into the outcome of any given Supreme Court case, as well as the capacity to throw the court in the benefit of one party or the other for years at a time. That's been proposed by others. Another possibility might be to apply a similar approach to legislation, with an expanded Congress closer to the 30,000:1 constituent to representative ratio initially in the US Constitution rather than the 616,000:1 ratio presently in place. That would result in a House of 11,000 members, however. (I'm willing to accept that this might prove infeasible, though I'd still like to see approaches enabling greater direct representation.) What if, as with the Supreme Court reform proposal, legislative votes were based on a subset of representatives, again allocated by lot from amongst members? Again, though outcomes would over time average to partisan representation, any given vote might, or might not, favour the majority party. One possible consequence: given the impossibility of guaranteeing a known outcome in votes, legislation might be written to more broadly consider overall views. This could avoid exremes, though it's worth noting that extremes gave rise to both highly discriminatory and civil-rights-reform practices. Some extremes seem less bad than others. There's also the probable outcome that the locus of control would shift elsewhere. I'd still like to see some discussion of such concepts.
vgel 4y ago
Athenian democracy worked this way--you had to opt-in to the candidate pool, but then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool. (Also, if people are interested in randomness in antique decision making, me & my wife made a simulator of an ancient lot oracle unearthed in modern Turkey: https://sortesalearum.com https://sortesalearum.com)
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  > then the candidate was chosen randomly from that pool The sad thing is, I feel that this method may actually produce better results than whatever popularity voting schemes we're currently using.
lolive 4y ago
Double-Face for president !
lolive 4y ago
Is the YiKing still something relevant, in the chinese culture, for decision-making [with a bit of randomness included]?
dredmorbius 4y ago
Numerous cultures did, and do, do that. (It's somewhat enshrined in modern-day RNGs used in simulation and forecasting models.) Michael Schulson's 2014 Aeon essay, "How to Choose" remains at the top of my best reads of the past decade: ... It makes sense that it should have taken Dove some 15 years to realise that randomness could be an asset. As moderns, we take it for granted that the best decisions stem from a process of empirical analysis and informed choice, with a clear goal in mind. That kind of decision-making, at least in theory, undergirds the ways that we choose political leaders, play the stock market, and select candidates for schools and jobs. It also shapes the way in which we critique the rituals and superstitions of others. But, as the Kantu’ illustrate, there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit. ... <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...> Examples include swidden farmers in New Guinea, China's I Ching, the Athenian Greek elections (more a lottery than today's FPTP precise-count balloting), Renaissance Italy's Doges, and contemporary college admissions, with references for further reading.

rolph 4y ago

if you could predict when certain phenomenon will occur, then act as if you are somehow in control of these things, you can spin up public perceptions of god-hood

paulcole 4y ago
Just wait until your enemies spin up public perceptions of your witch-hood.
- rolph 4y ago
  im thinking in the context of pre-judeo christian society. these tablets are close to 4000 years old. being possesed by gods was an in thing, a believe demons were a prechristian idea as well, so if witch, and demon could be interchanged somehow, i think that fits the era.
MonkeyClub 4y ago
Exactly, especially when you announce it to your subjects in large heavily incensed halls.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  I can think of a few things you might be implying with your wording but none of them make much sense in context.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    Anyone wanna fill me in? If it wasn’t clear, I was implying I’d like to be able to understand the implications of what I’m reading.
    - noisy_boy 4y ago
      If I had to take a guess: the scene being depicted in the comment could apply to any powerful king/priest of the past - imagine halls full of incense and chanting creating a feeling of mass hypnosis/hysteria (possibly intensified with consumption of psychedelics) and the booming voice of the king/priest proclaims their power over celestial objects - and it comes true due to normal celestial events/eclipses!

brightball 4y ago

I will treat my daily news and weather this way from now on.

arthurcolle 4y ago

Trader risk meeting in Assyria, basically

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nly 4y ago

The king likely didn't get up at 6am

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
We have plenty of records from other societies indicating how absolute rulers did and didn't schedule their days. A king has a potentially limitless amount of stuff to do and also the power to set his own schedule as well as servants to help him stick to it. Whether he slept a lot or a little and whether his schedule was biased early or late was almost certainly a matter of personal preference and convenience. An absolute ruler also has to consider the signal being sent. Being awake and dressed in time to attend morning colors with regularity sends a message that a ruler might deem worth the effort to send.

im3w1l 4y ago

I think it's absolutely amazing that the astronomy inspired the arts that would, thousands of years later, allow us to go to space.