August 2009
26 posts
When can we beat evolution?
I’ve posted before about What’s Next. This post comes from an essay in that book by Nick Bostrom. Bostrom is interested in suggesting a heuristic we might use to prioritize human enhancement research, assuming we want to prioritize ideas most likely to succeed.
Bostrom compares evolution to a surpassingly skillful engineer. Evolution worked tirelessly for many many years to develop...
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2 Questions to ask of those against the death...
I just finished reading a chilling article about a man executed a few years ago in Texas. Cameron Willingham, the defendant, wasn’t a great guy - he beat his wife and had repeatedly broken the law - but he was convicted and killed mostly on fuzzy forensic evidence that has since been discredited.
I’ve written before about the sorry state of oversight for forensic science in the...
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Feminism and Utilitarianism
Despite living and dying well before the 20th century, both Jeremy Bentham and his less weird successor John Stuart Mill were impressively liberal. Bentham, for example, argued for the decriminalization of homosexuality - ‘might as well spread the love, err utility around’. Both also used utilitarian premises to argue for women’s rights.
Their arguments basically had two...
Books I'd like to read: a catalog of emotions
This post is a continuation of sorts from my previous post about happiness, but on a broader level. I want to read a catalog of emotions.
Humans seem to come into this world with a programmed set of emotions. We all can recognize anger, sadness, boredom or happiness in ourselves and in others. There are some rarer affective states like ecstasy, elevation or embarrassment that produce distinct...
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Buying experiences
The Boston Globe’s Ideas column talks about research suggesting people who spend money on experiences — lunches with friends and so on — actually are happier. It’s a bit paradoxical: experiences are difficult to measure and transient compared to goods, yet it is experiences that seem to bring us the most enduring happiness.
It may be that spending on experiences with...
Cash for clunkers?
With the Cash for Clunkers program coming to an end, Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post arguing that the program will be seen “as at best, unnecessary, and at worst, a bad idea.” I think I agree. He puts forth a few arguments: the program just shifted auto consumption one quarter up, it just shifted consumption from non-auto to auto, and it hurt secondary industry players like...
Inglorious Basterds
Tonight I saw Quentin Tarantino’s newest movies, “Inglorious Basterds”. The plot follows the efforts of a team of American Jews, a British soldier, and a German movie star (in addition to another team of a French Jew and her lover) to killer Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi officials. The team of American Jews were known as the ‘Bastards’ by the Germans because they...
Teachers Unions - NYC Edition
Steven Brill has an article on New York City’s “rubber rooms” where teachers who have been deemed too incompetent or dangerous to teach but too hard to fire are paid six digit figures to sit in a room playing checkers, sleeping, and chatting. Like in other places, teachers are incredibly difficult to fire (for example, one teacher who was found passed out drunk in her classroom...
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Stewart Brand on ecopragmatism
I’ve blogged before about being generally positive towards geoengineering as a solution to climate change. I think there’s a newish consensus emerging that many classic pro-environment positions are misguided or impractical ways of actually improving climate.
Stewart Brand is among the leaders. He’s drawn four main points of difference with the environmental movement as it is...
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What's to be done about weaponization of...
An interesting and somewhat frightening column in Nature argues that weaponized neurological agents should be tightly regulated. I think the issue is complex.
First, there’s no question that we’ll be able to cause increasingly powerful and well-targeted effects in people’s brains within the coming decade. I’ve been writing about memory dampening and memory erasure for a...
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What makes for good science fiction
I’ve seen two good sci-fi movies recently: Moon and District 9. One big reason I liked both is that the “twist” comes in the first five minutes of the movie — or in the trailer. In Moon, the main character meets another man who looks like himself. In District 9, aliens land and are placed in a cordoned off district.
I feel like a lot of popular movies in this genre...
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What's the way to improve governance?
Some companies fail because of poor management and inane policies. Other companies are able to drive harder and faster because they get their processes right. Over time, best practices have developed to explain why some companies operate smoothly and others don’t. When a great business idea comes along, it’s emulated by others and quickly becomes a standard within an industry.
But...
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Rethinking the suburbs
A fun design competition asks its entrants to design the future of the suburbs. As the economy contracts and urbanization occurs, what’s to be done with the empty spaces?
Most of the finalists involve some variant on the following: replace some open space with a farm/plants! So build farms on top of parking lots, inside big box stores and empty mansions and in giant towers astride the open...
Should public defenders always want to win?
I just finished reading Defending the Damned, which is a journalist’s look at the Chicago public defender’s office. The public defenders in the book seem to handle the emotional turmoil of the job by distancing themselves from the actual emotional substance of the crime and obsessing with winning. They dream of the cases where their client is obviously guilty for the chance that they...
Outsourcing to Google
Through Gina Trapani’s Smarterware, I stumbled across a series of videos imagining what it would be like to have Google for a roommate. The idea is silly, but it is interesting to think about how Google is changing the way we live our lives.
Aside from the concerns about privacy or antitrust issues, it’s obvious that we are ceding fact-memorizing to Google and Wikipedia. Rather than...
New Atheists - are scientific and religious...
An opinion piece in the LA Times questions the tack taken by Dawkins and others of attacking any attempt to reconcile science and religion. New Atheists have taken to criticizing groups like the National Center for Science Education, an organization which tries to keep evolution taught in schools, for arguing that evolution and religion are not incompatible.
To me, regardless of what New...
GTD for students
Lifehacker has a post on applying Getting Things Done to the life of the student. While certainly not all of the book applies to college work (seriously, what student is going to use a 31-day tickler file?), there are a lot of useful parallels. A principle that I think GTD gets especially right is breaking up things you need to do into specific tasks.
Cal Newport writes a lot about “pseudo...
Why I'm not sure refuge markets would work
Andrew linked to a Robin Hanson talk that mentioned the possibility of using refuge markets to predict catastrophic events. The idea is that you can sell tickets to refuges for certain events or conditional on certain events, and then the price of such tickets can be used to predict the probability of such “black swan” events. Assuming it’s possible to make these refuges (and...
An evolutionary obligation to disclose cosmetic...
In Cheating Darwin: The Genetic and Ethical Implications of Vanity and Cosmetic Surgery, Kristi Scott argues that people are obligated to tell potential mates whether they have had cosmetic surgery in order to avoid deceiving partners about their genetic make-up and thus half the genetic make-up of their potential children. I don’t think this kind of obligation exists.
One way to respond...
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What's next pt. 1: the Northern Rim
I recently picked up What’s Next which is a collection of essays by young scientists on what they find interesting. I expect to discuss several of the essays on this blog. Here’s the first.
Essentially, Laurence Smith argues that conditions are ripe for a substantial migration to the northern parts of the US and lower Canada. Depending on how Russia’s political commotion plays...
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Complicated branding strategies and the secret...
The Chicago Tribune has an article about some new plans for a few Starbucks in Seattle and Chicago. In an odd twist for one of the world’s most known brands, the coffee chain is renovating some of its shops to eliminate the Starbucks brand. Instead they will be identified by their neighborhood (e.g. 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea).
Starbucks has a strong brand; but it seems like discerning...
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But "a man on the Lagrange point" is much less...
Remember when we were going to go back to the Moon and set up a moonbase and do all sorts of other cool stuff in space? That was in 2004 when Bush announced his plans for NASA. Unfortunately, it never got funded and we’ve just been hanging around the ISS.
We’ll have to wait and see how much Obama will change NASA’s funding situation, but if he does give NASA a bit more to spend...
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Really long bets
One of my favorite websites is longbets.org. It’s a site that will record and facilitate really long-term bets. Some examples of interesting bets from the site: bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event and the S&P 500 will beat a major hedge fund over the course of a decade.
Bets — in the form of prediction markets — are generally a good...
Drug-testing employees?
Some friends and I have been arguing over whether it is a good policy for employers to drug-test their employees (either before hiring them or periodically throughout their employment). I can see arguments in favor of screening government employees - it’s important that those who work for the government show respect the law both because it is their job to uphold or implement it and because...
My first days with a Kindle
My Kindle 2 (not the DX - too expensive and, with some endowment effect added in, I’d say too big) arrived on Friday, so I’ve now had a full weekend to test it out. It definitely has some drawbacks, but for the most part, I’m very happy with it.
There are a few annoyances. For one, it doesn’t handle special characters very well. So, while reading the Adventures of...
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Evaluating effort
Jonah Lehrer wrote an article about grit in the Boston Globe. Grit is a personality trait characterized by remaining determined in the face of hardship and long term focus on a primary task. The research he summarizes seems to suggest that the presence of grit is a powerful predictor of future success: those who can persist without being discouraged are more likely to achieve their goals. Those of...