Scott Adams of the Dilbert Blog asks: If someone offered you $100,000 to take a class for a few weeks, would you do it? I believe most of you would, assuming there is nothing terrible about the class itself. But if I change the offer to say you have a 30% chance of making $100,000,… Continue reading The Value of a Skill
Month: July 2015
Autism/Asperger’s the New ‘Cool’?
Yesterday the site was hacked and someone posted made a bogus post about poetry, which I deleted this morning. Self-hosted WordPress is a magnet for hackers and spammers. A post on Hacker News about an autistic Wikipedia editor, Guillaume Paumier, went viral, generating thousands of page views for Paumier’s site and heaps of laudatory approbation… Continue reading Autism/Asperger’s the New ‘Cool’?
The Daily View: Coding Camps, Billionaires, Airport to Nowhere, Liongate
No, billionaires don’t drive economic growth – and crony billionaires strangle it The article gets the cause and effect wrong. A billionaire by himself doesn’t create economic growth; a person becomes a billionaire by creating value, which creates growth. Some people, through their inventions, ingenuity, effort, IQ…etc, create more economic value than others, and these… Continue reading The Daily View: Coding Camps, Billionaires, Airport to Nowhere, Liongate
Nature Beats Nurture
An interesting post from Vox Nature beats nurture The “Blank Slate” theory is dead. It was never anything but political philosophy and science killed it. Every nominal justification for human equality is being gradually eliminated, one by one, as scientists revisit hypotheses that have long been passed off as pseudoscientific facts. This is true. The… Continue reading Nature Beats Nurture
Free Will – Welfare Liberals vs. Neo Liberals and HBD Conservatives
From Sam Harris’ “Free Will” says liberals understand role of luck It’s pleasing to my progressive self when modern science confirms one of the foundations of Democratic/liberal political philosophy. Such as, that we humans don’t have free will. It’s an illusion. Such is the message of Sam Harris’ captivating new book, the pleasingly short (66… Continue reading Free Will – Welfare Liberals vs. Neo Liberals and HBD Conservatives
The Writer and the Coder
I imagine the IQ required to get a short story published in the journal Asimov’s Fiction excludes 98% of the educated* population, but the pay of 7-8 cents a word (around $700 for a 10,000 word short story) is not so great. The same for ‘mid list‘ writers, who are published and have sales, but… Continue reading The Writer and the Coder
Bold, Determined, But Somewhat Wrong
From Victor Pride’s Bold & Determined: 33 Ways To Be The Greatest There is a schism between the Objectivist faction of millennials, who embody the ethos of self-determination and ‘hustle’, and the empiricists and rationalists on the right and neo-liberal left, who also tend to also be pro-capitalist, but are more skeptical of the ‘pull… Continue reading Bold, Determined, But Somewhat Wrong
The Tech Rich Keep Getting Richer
Amazon stock is going nuts in after hours on blowout earnings, defying the pessimists who keep insisting it’s overvalued. 83933463 shares times a $70 gain, take the log…that’s another $6 billion or so for CEO Jeff Bezos in the span of about 10 minutes. Whether it’s global warming or economic crisis, people who predict doom… Continue reading The Tech Rich Keep Getting Richer
Bryan Caplan: Anti-Democracy Pioneer
I’ve always wondered why bloggers on the alt-right, such as Steve and others, seem to show a mild deference to the GMU (George Mason University) school of economists, linking to and commenting on the blog posts of Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan. These economists tend to be free-market neoliberal pragmatists/utilitarians, not cultural conservatives, but the… Continue reading Bryan Caplan: Anti-Democracy Pioneer
Bernie Sanders Speech, Condensed Version
pretty much sums it up