Going Critical “But as much as I’ve thought about networks over the years, I didn’t appreciate (until very recently) the importance of simple diffusion. This is our topic for today: the way things move and spread, somewhat chaotically, across a network. Some examples to whet the appetite: Infectious diseases jumping from host to host within […]
Knausgaard’s Secular Confession “In Buddhism, on the contrary, absolute detachment is an end in itself. Since all attachments entail suffering, only absolute detachment can bring about the elimination of suffering that Buddhism holds out as your salvation. What ultimately matters is not who you are or what you do, what ultimately matters is that you […]
The Tyranny of Ideas “Lately, I’ve amused myself by operating through the lens that the world is run by ideas, rather than people. We tend to discuss mimetic effects in relation to mass consumption – its distributive effects – but less-frequently discussed is how mimetics affect creators themselves. I like thinking of people as vessels, […]
Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ “A grimmer example might be solitary confinement in prisons. The punishment was originally designed to encourage introspection: to turn the prisoner’s thoughts inward, to prompt her to reflect on her crimes, and to eventually help her return to society as a morally cleansed citizen. […]
Rent Control Poem “There is a very long list of documented harms that rent control causes. It provides a strong disincentive to build more rental housing. It drives landlords to reduce spending on maintaining their units until the quality of the housing has drawn down to the point where it matches the allowed rent. And […]
Rough: The Music Video a.e. productions
Rein in the four horsemen of irreproducibility “Yet many researchers persist in working in a way almost guaranteed not to deliver meaningful results. They ride with what I refer to as the four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse: publication bias low statistical power P-value hacking, and HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known). My generation and […]
Revisiting Fred Rogers’ 2002 Commencement Address “It’s not the honors and the prizes, and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted.”
1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled “To review: population growth increases technological growth, which feeds back into the population growth rate in a cycle that reaches infinity in finite time. But since population can’t grow infinitely fast, this pattern breaks off after a while. The Industrial Revolution tried hard to compensate for the “missing” […]
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds “Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own. […] One way to look at science is as a system that […]
‘Nones’ now as big as evangelicals, Catholics in the US “Americans claiming “no religion” — sometimes referred to as “nones” because of how they answer the question “what is your religious tradition?” — now represent about 23.1 percent of the population, up from 21.6 percent in 2016. People claiming evangelicalism, by contrast, now represent 22.5 […]
What’s Wrong with Moral Foundations Theory, and How to get Moral Psychology Right “A review of this literature suggests that there are (at least) seven well established types of cooperation: (1) the allocation of resources to kin; (2) coordination to mutual advantage; (3) social exchange; and conflict resolution through contests featuring (4) hawkish displays of […]
” The Sting of Meritocracy “Even when today’s elites devote themselves to public service, as many do, they tend not to see it as fulfilling an obligation to give back for an unearned privilege but as further demonstrating their own high-mindedness and merit. […] The claims to legitimacy of today’s elite are met with skepticism […]
The Great Miscalculator “The neoclassical economist sees the economy in a deterministic equilibrium and asks how that equilibrium can be improved. If instead we looked at economic outcomes as contingent, we would ask how catastrophic failure can best be prevented. Instead of assuming that the economy is robust, we would look for sources of fragility. […]
Ibn Tufayl and the story of the feral child of philosophy “Like the islanders, we follow principles that can undermine themselves. To be hospitable, we must be open to the stranger who violates hospitality. To be democratic, we must include those who are antidemocratic. To be worldly, our encounters with other people must be opportunities […]
How to Apply a Matrix Number Grid Effect to Images in Photoshop “Use Image > Adjustments > Posterize to reduce the number of shades of gray in the image. A value of 4 levels works well. Finally, change the mode of the photo layer from Normal to Multiply. Now all you’ll see will be the […]
How translation obscured the music and wordplay of the Bible “It might be objected that the books of the Bible are, after all, fundamentally religious texts, not works of literature but, for reasons we cannot altogether fathom, this tiny Israelite realm, though rather crude in comparison with its larger and more powerful ancient Near Eastern […]
Why the demoniac stayed in his comfortable corner of hell “In Kierkegaard’s words: ‘One may hear the drunkard say: “Let me be the filth that I am.”’ Or, leave me alone with my bottle and let me ruin my life, thank you very much. I heard this first from my father, and then from an […]
New Gilgamesh Fragment: Enkidu’s Sexual Exploits Doubled “What is interesting about this is that the epic tells that becoming human is a two-step process. First, one must learn to think like a human being, and second, one must learn to think like a member of society. After the first week of sex Enkidu may have […]
Between gods and animals: becoming human in the Gilgamesh epic “Gods are here depicted as the opposite of animals, they are omnipotent and immortal, whereas animals are oblivious and destined to die. To be human is to be placed somewhere in the middle: not omnipotent, but capable of skilled labour; not immortal, but aware of […]