Dystopia, The Novel

Not happy reading for the times.

An early US indignity in Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: a Family, 2029-2047 is China’s successful claim to +1 as its international calling prefix. That ain’t nothing.

There is no pande More...

A Convenient Urgency

“’We need to create fear!’ That’s what Al Gore said to me at the start of our first conversation about how to teach climate change… Al Gore asked me to help him… to show a worst-case future impact of a continued increase in CO₂ emissions.”

The quote above is from Hans Rosling’s More...

Factfulness: Malthus is Wrong – Fortunately

Thomas Robert Malthus wrote in 1798 that any increase in food supply would lead to increased population but that the increased population would decrease the food supply per person so there would be no benefit to increasing the food supply. The food supply cannot be expanded infinitely so eventual More...

Facts are Stranger than Fiction

Two surprises:

1. The world is getting better rapidly in almost every way
2. A stubborn old man’s preconceptions can be blown away repeatedly

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling More...

The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority

More wisdom from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

This rule has been hiding in plain sight; but Taleb drags it out in the open as the most important asymmetry affecting our daily lives and perhaps the future of civilization. The title of this po More...

The Wisdom of Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ethics don’t scale, Taleb says in his latest book, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life.

People tend to be virtuous in small groups, he says; but, once the groups get large, ethical rules lose their More...

Rules for Detecting BS

Borrowed from Astronomer Carl Sagan.

He called them rules for avoiding baloney but he wrote at a politer time. Given the flood of alleged science on the Internet and the impossibility of fact-checking it all, these rules are even more More...

Don’t Panic!

No question these are scary times. The new President, to be charitable, has made a lot of rooky mistakes. His grasp on reality slips in the face of any criticism, and he is faster to go on an ad hominem attack than a pit bull. Things are pretty scary on the other side as well. Most of th More...

It Depends How You Ask the Question – The Asian Disease Problem

Which explains a lot of where we are today

Quotes are from Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project describing the work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman an More...

Don’t Believe the Experts

A frightening study

We know from recent experience that political experts don’t have a very good track record but we’d all like to think that a doctor’s opinion is a fact. This scary old story is from Michael Lewis’ new book More...