Just as the production–possibility frontier curve describes how to optimize the production of goods, ‘social optimization’ describes how to minimize disagreement and maximize one’s appeal and popularity among a targeted/desired audience. Opinions/views that are too obvious are undesired even though many people may agree with…
From Nassim Tooleb The Masks Masquerade: Incompetence and Errors in Reasoning Around Face Covering Somehow this escaped my attention until only yesterday despite him writing it 5 months ago. As usual of anything written by Taleb, it is easy to refute, and went viral owing…
Tesla stock is above $480/share, but it did a 5-1 split, so the split-adjusted price is $2400, which is a 900% gain from the lows of 2019. This blows even Bitcoin and the vast majority of small cap stocks out of the water in terms…
This is pretty amazing…the S&P 500, after being down as much as 30% in March, has not only recovered all its losses but has also gained 10% for the year. Mind-blowing. If anything, despite my optimism about the market, I was not optimistic enough. How…
From The Atlantic The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse: A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news. Turchin’s core argument ,based on data mining and mathematical modeling, is that an overproduction of…
There is a common misconception about IQ as it pertains to national IQ and the purported ‘dumbing down of society’. Commentators online frequently lament about the existence of such dumbing-down. The misconception has to do with confusing or conflating relative or per-capita intelligence for absolute/total…
One thing I have noticed about the smart-left and the smart-right is that they seem to gravitate to a core set of anchor beliefs and experiences that unify them despite being opposites politically, that you do not see with the mainstream left/right. The mainstream left/left…
I think at this stage it is reasonable to assume Trump has lost, in spite of his best efforts to forestall defeat. There is not going to be a recount, not because there was no fraud, but no one in charge wants a repeat of…
I saw this going viral The Joys of Being a Stoic Over the past four or so years there has been considerable interest stoicism, especially online, and articles about the befits of stoicism frequently go viral. Maybe it is in response to coping with Trump;…
In regard to recent podcast with Joe Rogan, much of Greenwald’s criticism is focused on the overreach of the US government, but another problem is private sector having too much control , such as tech censorship. The private sector, unlike the public sector, has far…