The Cabinet of Wikipedian Curiosities
I have spent a lot of time browsing Wikipedia. It’s one of my most common procrastination activities. For some time, I’ve been collecting my favourite articles, presented here for your reading pleasure. I found some of these through @depthsofwikipedia, Aella, and various links aggregators, but I don’t remember which articles came from where! In killing…
Things I Recommend You Buy and Use, Sam Edition
Sam Bowman began a trend in the blogosphere of recommending products, which was followed up by Rob Wiblin, Alexey Guzey and several others. While this concept might sound tacky, I have found these posts to be surprisingly useful. This is for a few reasons. First, when I get recommendations from someone I trust, I know…
Why Northern Ireland Has No Flag
I love flags. The power of a piece of cloth to motivate people to fight, revere, or weep is inherently interesting. Flag design is also a constrained optimisation problem: how do you trade off symbolism and simplicity in a rectangle (or weird double triangle thing) that needs to be viewed at a distance? Northern Ireland…
The Parable of the Rocketship and other tidbits
I send lots of emails to my friends about what I’ve been reading and reflections I’ve had. Some of these grow into blog posts, but usually, they are not developed or well-researched enough for that. Here is a sample of emails I’ve sent recently, edited for clarity. The Parable of the Rocketship Hi all, Let…
The Three Little Piggies of Rationality
There are three related logical fallacies, which I call the Three Little Piggies of rationality. A strawman is when you argue against a simplified view that your opponent doesn’t have. A steelman is when you argue against a more sophisticated view than the one your opponent has. And a weakman is when you argue against…
A New Book to Introduce People to Ethical Vegetarianism
My new favourite book about vegetarianism is Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism by the philosopher Michael Huemer, published in 2019. I think it should be the new standard text in effective altruism fellowships and discussion groups to introduce issues surrounding eating meat. Ending factory farming is only one part of animal advocacy, but I am dissatisfied…
Bryan Caplan meets Socrates
Socrates and Glaucon are walking down from the Acropolis, when they encounter a stranger from a distant land. Caplan: Greetings, Socrates. Socrates: Greetings, stranger. From whence do you come? Caplan: I am from a faraway land. Socrates: Sparta? Thrace? Caplan: Much further out than that. Socrates: Where, then? Caplan: It is not important right now.…
People Used to Dream in Black and White
On an episode of Julia Galef’s podcast, the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel said the following: “For [dreams], there was actually a literature that’s very interesting where people in the ’50 in the United States and the ’40s thought that dreams just generally were black and white. I don’t think that they thought it was just dreams…
Links for January
What I’ve been reading Which country has the world’s best healthcare system? An argument that you should buy things, not experiences. Chris Blattman has restarted blogging. See for example his best non-fiction of the year, parts one and two. The story of scurvy; or, why reality is very weird. Things you are doing but…
Disambiguating the ‘Observable Universe’
I’ve seen a lot of confusion over what precisely the term ‘observable universe’ refers to. This post is an attempt to remedy that. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding. He observed that light emitted from distant celestial objects was redder than expected, due to the downward shift in frequency as their…
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Sam Enright 