At the beginning of this chat I had with Noah Millman, you’ll note my caveat: I speak as a dedicated but decidedly amateur student of artificial intelligence. Noah makes a similar announcement. I was thrilled to be invited by him to discuss issues of the philosophy and theory of knowledge of AI, and I had […]
Continue reading →Here’s an article in America’s most pedigreed repository of credulous woowoo, Wired, on the techy side of homeschooling. Homeschooling (or as I like to call it, artisanal segregation) is a really natural fit with the norms of Silicon Valley, a community that takes as its central premise that its members are smarter and better than everyone. Might as […]
Continue reading →I did some explainer journalism in handy flow-chart form.
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 →So this Bluetooth Ring deal turns out to be yet another crowdfunded apparatus that over-promises and under-delivers This is a particularly embarrassing case, but it’s only one in a whole litany of Kickstarter failures. It’s standard practice to rush to say that crowdfunding produces a lot of successes too. (This Gizmodo write up of Ring […]
Continue reading →Here’s a regression line from a study purporting to show a relationship between Global Index on Legal Recognition of Homosexual Orientation, a multivariate index of gay rights, and GDP, relayed by Jay Michaelson of the Daily Beast. (via The Dish) Do you see a problem here? That is not a particularly strong relationship to begin with, […]
Continue reading →I’ve been banging on against the STEM shortage myth for a long time now, but this is only part of a broader argument. We’re living in an age where a lot of chin-scratching econ types a) blame people for their own unemployment on the theory that what they studied is frivolous/impractical/whatever, and b) push them […]
Continue reading →Corey Robin: One of the hallmarks of a repressive state, particularly in the twentieth century, is the use of blackmail against gays and lesbians in order to get them to collaborate and inform on their friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and other potential or actual dissidents. The Stasi was notorious for turning gays and lesbians into collaborators […]
Continue reading →Timothy B. Lee, going after Jill Lepore’s wonderful takedown of the cult of disruptive innovation: One of the big problems with the theory of disruptive innovation is that its originator, Clay Christensen, faced a conflict of interest that we might call the “Innovator’s Dilemma” Dilemma. In the introduction to his 1997 book, Christensen wrote that “colleagues […]
Continue reading →As Libby Nelson wrote, it seems like everybody and their brother, including your cousin Freddie, wrote about the Brookings Institution paper on student loan debts today. It’s an emotional conversation. Given the limitations of our information, it’s also a frustrating conversation. But it’s a profoundly necessary type of conversation, and one that we’re going to […]
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