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From Quillette The End of the World as We Know It? The gist of this article is that the world needs more people to stave off crisis of innovation, and that arguments against overpopulation and economic destruction due to too many humans, are unfounded. I have seen similar arguments made by, generally, neoliberals, who argue… Continue reading Population: It’s quality that matters, not quantity

Now Josh Brown, aka the Reformed Butthead, is hyping Bitcoin after it has already doubled. As usual, Josh is late to the party. And if his past predictions are any indication, this is a top for Bitcoin and it will probably fall to $7k or lower soon. In fact Bitcoin has already fallen from a… Continue reading Bitcoin: It Still Sucks

Bill Gates Paul put out a video critical of the q-anon movement and how it’s leading its followers astray A came to similar conclusion about how Q has failed to deliver on any of its prophecies. There is no plan, no ‘mass arrests’ of Hollywood pedophiles and democratic officials, and no storm. Just the same… Continue reading Ramz: QAnon was Fake and Harmful

Similar to the 2020 election, the 2020 election has been dragged into overtime. ‘Stop the steal’ has become a rallying cry against alleged fraud that cost Trump reelection. I don’t care that much who wins or who had the election stolen from whom. It does not affect my personal life much either way. I think… Continue reading Skepticism about ‘Stop the Steal’

A common narrative you see online is how much cheaper things used to be many generations ago, and how everything is so expensive now. The narrative goes along the lines of “In the ’30s, college cost $5/semester and you could buy a home for a couple thousand dollars. Now everything is too expensive.” Obviously, things… Continue reading Were 1930s ‘cheap’? It depends

A useful heuristic I have found is that well-worn narratives, especially media narratives or narratives promoted by powerful or influential people, tend to be wrong, or at the very least incomplete. You should always be skeptical of narratives even if promoted by academics, the media, and experts. Always do your own research to independently verify… Continue reading Questioning commonly held assumptions and narratives

It is any really surprise Taleb believes this "Productivity" in academia is not measurable, neither in # of citations, nor # papers. It's a metric for rent seekers & administrators. 1 mil papers/year & few results. If he's not enjoying "productivity", and visibly enjoying Twitter, he should stay that way. Apolafse ti Zoi! https://t.co/MEK8qv0hlj —… Continue reading Move over, Newton

I thought this was pretty fascinating…from the post The verbal tilt model, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard posits a link between IQ and social status, as shown by the matrix below: Regardless of political affiliation, high IQ people, either in terms of quantitative or linguistic/verbal intelligence, have higher social status relative to their peers than those… Continue reading IQ and Social Status and Success

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 them (such as the banal observation that ‘war is bad’),… Continue reading Social Optimization

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 to Talweb’s huge popularity as a writer and all the… Continue reading Taleb wrong about masks , again