Comments on: The Human Yardstick https://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/the-human-yardstick/ From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small Thu, 28 May 2026 23:08:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 By: Candide III https://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/the-human-yardstick/comment-page-1/#comment-1303802 Candide III Fri, 20 Jun 2014 06:30:36 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=35239#comment-1303802 Gwern: +1. It’s like those historical theories that Napoleon and Julius Caesar were actually the same person etc. that seem to surface with some regularity.

]]> By: Gwern https://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/the-human-yardstick/comment-page-1/#comment-1302905 Gwern Thu, 19 Jun 2014 15:39:31 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=35239#comment-1302905 Eh… His list of empires is short, his table on page 4 excludes several he mentions in his text, like the Babylonian Empire, he’s definitely tilting the numbers the way he wants (what are the odds of 3 out of the 11 empires listed all lasting exactly 250 years when the range is 207–267?*), and later research which looks more comprehensive shows no cliff at 250 years but just an exponential. That dataset suggests a mean somewhat close to 250 (220 years) but the exponential distribution, if true, strongly argues against any kind of “life cycle of empires”.

* Assuming that he had for some reason chosen in advance to list only empires lasting 207 to 267 years and empire-years are distributed uniformly at random, then we can see how many “collisions” we’d expect using a variant on the birthday paradox — in Haskell: `let n = 11 in let d = (267-207) in n - d + (d*(((d-1)/d)^11))` ~> 0.87. So we’d expect less than 1 collision (and certainly not 2 collisions on the same year-count), if he weren’t rounding numbers or something like that.

]]> By: Marc Pisco https://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/the-human-yardstick/comment-page-1/#comment-1302648 Marc Pisco Thu, 19 Jun 2014 11:36:09 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=35239#comment-1302648 …who, I hadn’t known, ended up president of ANSI and ISO, very appropriately.

]]> By: Marc Pisco https://www.isegoria.net/2014/06/the-human-yardstick/comment-page-1/#comment-1302641 Marc Pisco Thu, 19 Jun 2014 11:27:35 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=35239#comment-1302641 I thought you meant this guy.

]]>