So much going on lately. Sometimes it feels overwhelming. From the NyTimes (obligatory archive.is link) YouTube suspends Rand Paul for a week over a video disputing the effectiveness of masks. The good ol’ “spreading Covid-19 misinformation,” a favorite, along with ‘hate speech’ and ‘inciting violence’. A YouTube representative said the Republican senator’s claims in the… Continue reading Social Media Censorship Continues, Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Greene suspended

A few days ago, Tucker Carlson met with Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban. This apparently caused a lot of outrage by ‘the left’, yet until someone mentioned the controversy on Reddit, I wasn’t even aware of this meeting. Even though I think I spend too much time online, somehow this went undetected on my radar.… Continue reading The Declining Relevance of the Mainstream Media

Saw this viral tweet by Edward Snowden: I was looking to understand why @nntaleb was cyber-bullying a young woman who writes on economics, and I stumbled upon a frankly unbelievable history of inability to handle even gentle criticism—by a man who titled his book "Antifragile." This behavior goes back years. pic.twitter.com/Jm2cSqC0EC — Edward Snowden (@Snowden)… Continue reading Taleb vs. Snowden

I suspect there is a sort of cognitive dissonance between what upper-income, professional-class liberals say they believe in, and what they actually believe and do. I think they know that conveying wokeness in public and on social media is just the socially accepted thing to do, not something to base one’s life around or as… Continue reading The Great Disconnect

Came across a recent meta-study purporting that effect of lead on crime is negligibly small, effectively debunking the lead-crime hypothesis. From the abstract: Does lead pollution increase crime? We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime by pooling 529 estimates from 24 studies. We find evidence of publication bias across a… Continue reading The effects of childhood lead exposure on crime and IQ likely overstated

The Gwern article McNamara’s Folly: The Denial of Individual Differences has gone viral many times. I think however he overstates his case. I, probably like many others who read his review or similar articles about Project 100,000, such as on Unz.com or on Reddit, was under the mistaken impression that McNamara enlisted literal retards (or… Continue reading Project 100,000: An Analysis

This is the first post of a multi-part Q&A series about economcis and investing The bull market is long in the tooth. How long can it continue? Will future returns be poor? From Josh Brown, This is why, he writes: The S&P 500 has been compounding at 14% per year over the last ten years.… Continue reading Stock Market Investing Series, Part 1: Why The Stock Market Has Gone Up So Much

If one listens to the media, one may be inclined to believe that China and the US are on the brink of war, much like the 50s and the ever-present threat of nuclear war by the Soviets, or that the US is falling behind China. From Freddie Deboer Please Don’t Let Political Contrarianism Turn You… Continue reading Not Worried about China-US Relations or Crisis

Most people if surveyed will vastly overestimate the rarity and difficulty of being a millionaire and underestimate the rarity of high IQ. Online, Mensa-level IQs are a dime a dozen is seems, but, astonishingly, having $1 million dollars net worth is more common by a factor by a factor of 5 than merely having an… Continue reading The wealth-IQ perception disconnect (why being wealthy seems so much rarer than being smart)

Tyler Cowen is always good at providing contrarian takes on popular issues, for example regarding why healthcare in the US is so expensive, and or why Americans spend so much on healthcare: Tyler Cowen: Spending a lot on health care is the American way Once we focus on consumption, America’s high health-care expenditures no longer… Continue reading Tyler Cowen: Why Healthcare is So Expensive in America, part 1