This piece from Mike Konczal on the revelations that major tech firms colluded against their workers is, like most of Konczal’s work, a must-read, and I encourage you to really sink your teeth into what this says about the balance (or “balance”) between employers and employees in contemporary America. At the risk of descending into […]
Continue reading →Awhile back, I watched the Central Park Five, the Ken Burns documentary about five black and Hispanic teens that were accused of raping and beating a white woman in Central Park, before finally being exonerated. The question that the film asks, again and again, is how did this happen? Why did no one ask more questions? […]
Continue reading →Check out this piece from xkcd, the beloved and influential web comic. I think it’s a good example of how important how you position your argument is relative to the arguments you’re fighting against, how desperately people want to be the underdog. (I share this comic via a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License. The creator […]
Continue reading →I really want to be completely on board with this brief post by Alan Jacobs and its longer followup, on creation and thinking and productivity tools. In the first instance, I am 100% in agreement with Jacobs when he says But whenever I am asked to contribute to this genre — the writerly-tips-and-tricks genre or […]
Continue reading →Since this is a conversation I just can’t drag myself out of– this brief post by Alan Jacobs, about yet another person claiming that teaching kids to code will be our salvation, inspires me to highlight a point I’ve made a few times before. Many people are making some version of the argument that, in […]
Continue reading →It’s not unusual for me to feel exasperated by things I read online, but reading this piece on “sentient code” from VentureBeat had me throwing my hands in the air. It’s everything wrong with popular writing about artificial intelligence: filled with hype, vague where specificity is needed most, and generally credulous in a breathless, gee-whiz […]
Continue reading →Here’s two important ideas from statistics that I wish would filter out a bit more, so that people could better evaluate statistics that are in the news. 1. It’s not the sample size, it’s the sample mechanism. Well, OK. It’s somewhat the sample size, obviously. My point is that most people who encounter a study’s methodology are […]
Continue reading →So I thought this was funny. Now, I don’t know how an august thinkfluencer and popular internet celebrity like Barro happened upon this little academic blog, but that’s not important. What is important is that this Tweet is flagrantly, straightforwardly, unambiguously dishonest. You can read the piece here. I said that, to me, Barro becomes […]
Continue reading →I’ll never forget when the original Xbox was announced. There were howls from the Apple crowd, at a time when they actually were the underdogs that some still pretend to be. “Microsoft’s trying to take over everything! It’s monopoly! One company should not control so many products!” Flash forward to today, and Apple releases a broader range […]
Continue reading →It’s not unusual to hear people wonder aloud about why certain behaviors that are rarely encountered in the physical world are encountered in online interactions. I believe a big part of the answer to that, and one of the keys to understanding online culture altogether, lies in the way in which social approval is made […]
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