Ineffective Theory

For a few years now, I’ve had this vague sense that the U.S. flag is at half-staff more often than it used to be.

Price discrimination accomplishes: redistribution from rich to poor, without government intervention, on a strictly voluntary basis, tending to increase efficiency.

I used to think Schindler’s List a beautiful movie.

(This is all written with low confidence.)

When a sequence of six digits is chosen at random: All digits are distinct 15.12% of the time.

Every once in a while, the topic of peer review (and, usually, why it’s Horrible™) comes up on Hacker News, X, and I guess pretty much everywhere else.

Under many models of voting behavior, elections disproportionately (relative to present-day demographics) represent the interests of the elderly.

I show you a coin, and I tell you “both sides of this coin are heads”.

Decide who you’re going to vote for years ahead of time.

I don’t maintain anything like a “blogroll”—I imagine there’d be some pressures associated with that—but since I’m no longer doing regular links posts, heres a short list of sites I’ve found to be consistently worth reading over the last year or so.

There is a strain of thought, common among those who are both technically literate and policy- or economically minded, that energy production and consumption underlies the economy in a fundamental way.

Another plagiarism affair.

At least in Julia 1.10 (also 1.9), macros are not compiled.

Bryan Caplan started it (and seems to have dropped it), and I think it’s a good idea, so here goes.

A common sentiment is that trained scientists have an important skill, often called “taste”, which is crucial in identifying worthwhile work.

This book is a history of one corner of American politics: the debate, now approaching a century old, over which bits of nuclear information ought to be protected, and how.

New substack and a good interview regarding PEPFAR.

Briefly: if you hear a claim, you heard it for a reason.

Brief context: a prominent paper from 2020 on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 leaned heavily against any sort of “lab leak” hypothesis.

Paul Graham has an advice post, which is quite good.

Here is the famous paper on atmospheric ignition after a nuclear explosion.

A couple months ago, I broke my wrist (triquetral fracture).

Scott Alexander on sexuality statistics.

You blow up a balloon, and don’t stop when you should.

It’s time for a reminder: I put links here because they are enlightening to read, or at least skim.

Reading James C.

Hanson on modern bandits.

(I’m writing this so that I can dig it up later when I’ve inevitably forgotten the trick in half a year.)

Musings from China on expert failure.

Hanson on Christmas.

Sven Bachmann: On the classification of quantum phases of matter.

Data on (perceptions of) children, broken down by gender and political affiliation.

Persistence!.

PredictIt loses its special status from the CFTC; will most likely be forced to shut down.

Caplan on human smuggling.

Here are two questions on Manifold markets: Will there be a federal mask requirement on US domestic flights on November 8, 2022?

Hanson on selection biases for arguments.

There’s a standard piece of internet wisdom: don’t talk to the police.

Treat thinkers as a portfolio—that is, don’t look for a single optimum, but instead try to have a broad spread.

Epistemic note: I am only minimally knowledgable in matters related to cosmology.

Sometime around 75 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates who held him for ransom.

Things happen in the world.

Let’s imagine simulating a lattice field theory on a quantum computer.

Very few interesting things happened in the past month.

This famous video is a good demonstration of just wide a range of physical sizes objects in our universe span.

The LHC performs something like one billion proton-proton collisions per second.

I generally don’t write—at least explicitly—about current events.

There’s an interesting phenomenon where many individually honest people come together and form a hypocritical group.