Category: Uncategorized

Vox Day is at it again: Jordan Peterson humiliates himself. Um…except that: No one really cares what The Guardian, which is a second-rate British newspaper, says; not Dr. Peterson’s fans, nor Zizek’s fans. The New York Times or the WSJ carries weight; The Guardian doesn’t, especially not an opinion column written by some no-name contributor.… Continue reading Jordan Peterson Zizek Debate

A few days ago I wrote about fake experts, who are taken seriously by the media despite having little to no credentials and having generally bad and or unoriginal ideas, but that does not mean actual credentialed experts are also immune from having bad ideas. An example of the latter is Peter Turchin, who despite… Continue reading Peter Turchin is (probably) wrong about crisis, again

I’m sure many have heard about a 2013 study that purports that people of the Victorian era were smarter than current-day people, which has gotten considerable media attention. Reaction times – a reliable marker of general intelligence – have declined steadily since the Victorian era from about 183 milliseconds to 250ms in men, and from… Continue reading Were the Victorians smarter? Probably not

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