September 2009
16 posts
A brief hiatus...
Wansley and my contract period ended September 20th. We’re taking a week long break to decide whether to contract again and, if so, under what terms.
If you have any good contract ideas (maybe how to solve the quantity/quality problem), leave a comment.
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The nationalism of liberals and conservatives
Ben Casnocha recently argued that while liberals point to conservatives’ bastardization of patriotism for aggressive foreign policy, they are equally guilty of appropriating nationalist ideas for their own aims. In particular, through nationalistic trade policies (“Buy American”, tariffs, etc.) liberals undermine the American economy, as well as endangering the livelihoods of the...
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Why would hell exist?
Marcus Gadson, a Dartmouth student and friend who blogs at The Gadson Review, has a post offering a justification for the existence of hell within the Christian religion. He offers three possible reasons - retribution, incapacitation (don’t let sinners pollute hell), and deterrence. I don’t really think these are sufficient for two reasons:
First - Hell is a disproportionately severe...
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Amazon vs. Target
I have recently shopped both at Target and Amazon, and had a different experience with both.
It was a bit tricky to find what I needed at Target (black socks, if you must know). I couldn’t see all of signs overhead and it wasn’t obvious to me whether to look where the shoes were or where the boxers were. It reminded me of old school web portals that used to keep a categorized...
The value of Twitter
Everybody has an opinion about Twitter. Robert Scoble thinks it’s great, but those smarties over at the Economist’s Free Exchange blog think it’s going nowhere.
For the longest time nobody thought Facebook was going to make any money, but now they’re cash flow positive. It’s also important to remember that Google was not profitable for some time after it’s...
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What France and Bhutan have in common
France is moving toward using a metric for national happiness in its economic policy, something Bhutan has done for decades. For France, the transition is rather transparent, since the country hasn’t been performing as well as other developed countries in GDP terms, but should gain GNH (Gross National Happiness) points for its liberal labor and health policies.
GDP and per capita GDP are...
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More memory tricks
The holy grail of memory research has been called the Marilyn Monroe experiment. The experiment might involve implanting a pleasant memory of the experiment’s eponymous sex symbol in some lucky scientist’s brain. If we could implant memories, then that would be a strong indication that we had indeed found, and understood on a practical level, the physical mechanism of memory.
We...
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Last post on sports
This post, the last of three looks at sports in American society, focuses on little league sports.
Charles Wheelan argues that the reason youth sports have grown increasingly serious over time is that they are zero-sum, so they tend toward arms race “collective irrationality”. Basically, if all the other kids are playing for 3 club teams in the off season, you don’t make the...
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Guiltless chicken and beef
New Scientist magazine has an article about creating “pain-free” animals. According to the magazine, Adam Shriver is a philosopher arguing we should consider it as a more ethical way to eat meat.
I think among college students today there’s a sense that society will be moving in a vegetarian direction in the coming decades, even if they aren’t vegetarians or think the...
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Sports continued
The second take on sports comes from Derek Sivers’s re-hashing of a few years’ old talk by Kurt Vonnegut. Sivers and Vonnegut say that people have trouble reconciling the dramatic twists and turns of a story or movie with the more meandering and mundane experience of everyday life. We walk out of a Sunday matinee-showing and wonder where the montage-friendly ups and downs are in our...
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Three takes on the seriousness of sports
21st century America cares a lot about its sports. 12 year old NBA-hopefuls play in 3 leagues at the same time while working with private coaches to try to land spots on their middle school basketball teams. Meanwhile, their parents are - embarrassingly - thrown out of their games for getting a little too into the action and cursing at the referees. That is, that’s when they’re not...
Moral distance
Peter Singer is responsible for the following famous thought experiment.
Suppose you’re walking through the woods in a brand new and quite expensive suit. You pass by a pond and in that pond see a small child drowning. You could easily save the child by wading in, but doing that would ruin your suit. You walk by.
Have you done something wrong in this story? Most people think yes. Now...
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Beating evolution part 2
This post continues from one of my posts last week. I’m discussing Nick Bostrom’s article in What’s Next about areas evolution might produce beatable results. The first area was “changed tradeoffs,” and there are a few others.
The second area is “value discordance.” Don’t be scared by the name, it’s pretty simple: evolution doesn’t want...
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More on the future of newspapers
I know I know, I’ve posted about the future of newspapers before, but this article in the New York Review of Books got me thinking again.
One passage which caught my eye was:
The fall-off in ad revenues has been compounded by another phenomenon that newspaper executives would rather not discuss: their own greed. The relentless stress placed on acquisition and consolidation, which...
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Why so few women contributing to Wikipedia?
According to a survey cited by the Wall Street Journal only 13% of contributors to Wikipedia articles are female. Part of the gap is made up just by the gender disparity in readers of Wikipedia (68% are male), but that doesn’t come close to explaining why so few contributors are women.
Any ideas for why such a large disparity exists?
Ideas (assuming the survey was done correctly and...