Month: April 2019

On April 18th, the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, was released to Congress and the public, which, predictably, exonerated Trump from accusations of collusion with Russia. And yet again, I was right that it would be a nothing-burger. A no-brainer prediction, but I’ll take credit for it anyway.… Continue reading The Mueller Report, Part 2

Having a lot of money means erroneous, bad, or unoriginal opinions are taken seriously and take precedence over experts and ‘good’ opinions (at least by the media; academia is more discriminating). Predictions of AI risk are a dime a dozen, but when Elon Musk opines about it as he occasionally does such as in 2017… Continue reading Fake Experts

Scott’s epic article Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, went viral. At the end, this passage stood out: I became interested in this topic partly because there’s a widespread feeling, across the political spectrum, that everything is getting worse. I previously investigated one facet of this – that necessities are… Continue reading The Competence Bubble

Indeed, it’s not your imagination that America feels more partisan and divided than ever: it’s supported by polling data going back as far as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which shows that Trump’s approval rating has hovered in the tightest range of any president, at around 38-45%. Similar to Obama, people’s minds were made up about Trump… Continue reading The ’90s and now, part 2

In recent years there has been an obsession that China’s economic data is ‘fake’. A March 7, 2019, Brookings article, which went viral, A forensic examination of China’s national accounts, estimates that China’s GDP growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower than the official numbers. In a 2013 article by Foreign Policy, Lies, Damned… Continue reading China’s ‘Fake’ Economic Data: Why I’m Not Concerned

Ross Douthat is nostalgic for the ’90s, in a viral article, writing: But as a statement about generational experiences, Alter was basically right. If you were born around 1980, you grew up in a space happily between — between eras of existential threat (Cold War/War on Terror, or Cold War/climate change), between foreign policy debacles… Continue reading The ’90s and now, part 1

Given that the charges against Julian Assange don’t mention espionage, Russia, or 2016, and that all he did was ‘aid’ in hacking (in agreeing to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on United States Department of Defense), it’s not even clear what, if any laws, were broken. A lot of people are speculating if… Continue reading Julian Assange

Predicting the Future An astute reader may notice that although “by 1950, Britain no longer was the world’s greatest power,” almost seventy years later, America is still number one. After a huge boom in the 70’s and 80’s, by 1990 Japan’s economy entered a prolonged recession and fell behind China and Germany, where it has… Continue reading On the Difficulty of Predicting the Future

View this post on Instagram So begins little Benji’s attempt to get Trump out of office A post shared by MILO (@milo.yiannopoulos) on Apr 8, 2019 at 10:37am PDT Milo is trying to signal how he’s more ‘right-wing than thou’, but all he’s showing is his obsolescence as a public figure who is fading from… Continue reading The Downfall of Milo and the Rise of the Alt-Middle/Center

The Quillette article In Defense of Scientism generated significant disagreement in the comments. Articles on Quillette about social-justice and politics-related topics get much less criticism than the above example. The authors erred by venturing into philosophy, but why do people care so much? Philosophy is difficult subject that does not take kindly to dilettantes. If… Continue reading The trouble with philosophy