Rebane's Ruminations
January 2026
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Category: Critical Thinking & Numeracy

  • George Rebane Years back in a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (see also ‘The Antifragile Taleb’) he described himself as having achieved the status of a flâneur.  His circuitous description of such a person was immediately inviting to me.  I am a long-time fan (student?) of Taleb, and admire his depth of knowledge about many…

  • George Rebane One of our politicians, I now forget who, recently let slip the notion that American blacks have benefitted from having ancestors who were slaves – he stated that American slavery had bestowed redeemable aspects on those progenies who today share protected freedoms with our white population. Of course, the politician was immediately attacked…

  • George Rebane New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron in a 35-page opinion “found that Donald Trump and his family business committed fraud by making false and misleading valuations on much of his real-estate empire and ordered the cancellation of legal certificates that have allowed the Trumps to do business in the state.”  He claims that “the Trumps have…

  • George Rebane With the upcoming Trump trials it’s time to take a more focused look at how his indictments for exercising ‘unconstitutional speech’ are holding up in the land of the First Amendment and free speech.  As a starting point I’ll take a leftwing reader’s comment in the most recent Sandbox. ***** George Do you…

  • George Rebane America’s numeracy has been covered in these pages since RR launched.  As technology accelerates in these pre-Singularity years, our innumeracy has become more of a critical factor in how we govern ourselves and our general quality of life that depends on our ability to create wealth.  For example, it’s almost impossible for the…

  • George Rebane The submersible Titan is now most certainly lost with five dead tourists aboard.  The search for Titan has been going on since contact with it was lost within two hours into the mission to visit the wreckage of the sunken Titanic resting at a depth of approximately 12,000 feet. (more here) As an…

  • [The following is a recent commentary by Victor Davis Hanson, an academic and national intellect familiar to RR readers.  In it he again summarizes the socio-political travesties that America’s Left, abetted by our foreign enemies, daily visits upon our people most of whom ill-prepared by their schooling to understand, let alone resist, these propagandized assaults.…

  • George Rebane The recent burst of large language models (LLMs) from AI research has reinvigorated the Singularity related topics of machine sentience, sapience, super-intelligence, agency, ethics, morals, …, along with prognoses of what they may have in store for humans when/if they become ascendant.  Most commentators, including yours truly, see a high likelihood of a…

  • From each according to his ability and to each according to his need – Communist Axiom George Rebane California consumers will soon be paying for their utilities according to how much money they make.  The long-denied face of Marxism will have arrived in full force if the utilities and the Public Utilities Commission have their…

  • George Rebane  In ‘The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT’s pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation’ three German academicians – Jochen Hartmann, Jasper Schwenzow, and Maximilian Witte – publish the result of an early milestone study that confirms what many ChatGPT users have already experienced.  To give you more than an idea of its contents,…