… before they’ll even consider letting you work for pay. “First: Create a profile on BuzzFeed and publish a number of posts that show off your internet chops and writing prowess. How well do you get the BuzzFeed voice and style? Check out these posts to see what kinds of things perform the best on our site: http://www.buzzfeed.com/hot Then, and only […]
Continue reading →One of my basic beliefs about politics is that, over a long enough time frame, all political movements become indistinguishable from the parodies their opponents make of them. So in the world of conservatism, you see things like rolling coal, a kind of performative idiocy in which the other side’s exaggerated definition of what you […]
Continue reading →1. Studies say pirates pay for more content than people who don’t pirate. Those studies are old, small, and of dubious methodology, involving self-reported data. Of course, none of the people who constantly invokes them cares to look at them too closely. They are believed because they tell people what they want to hear. But even […]
Continue reading →Lauren Davis of io9 has a collection of internet comics that, she claims, “shut down terrible internet arguments.” I suppose that depends on your definition of “shutting down.” If that just means “insult and dismiss the person you’re arguing with,” then sure, those comics are very effective. They suggest the superiority of the people who […]
Continue reading →Whenever I get into these correlation and causation battles (and I do frequently, both in the university and online), they seem to go wrong in two ways: one, people often insist on an entirely unhelpful definition of the word “implies,” and two, people often presume some quantitative signifier of absolute causation that does not exist in […]
Continue reading →I’ve written, in the past, that I think the reflexive statement “correlation is not causation” has actually become more dangerous than people naively assuming that correlation does equal causation. I was reminded of this recently when I was reading Siddartha Mukherjee’s magnificent “biography of cancer,” The Emperor of All Maladies. The relationship between lung cancer and […]
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