1
Poverty
In order to make progress against poverty in the future, we need to understand poverty around the world today and how it has changed.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 47 posts.
2
Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future
I knew the future would be shocking but this is a whole other level.
3
Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
[Previously in series: Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know; SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, etc. This is all preliminary and you should not take it as a rea…
4
The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
I. A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, a…
5
Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty
[Related to: It’s Bayes All The Way Up, Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?, Can We Link Perception And Cognition?] I. Sometimes I have the fantasy of being able to glut m…
6
Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner.
7
War and Peace
How common are armed conflict and peace between and within countries? How is this changing over time? Explore research and data on war and peace.
8
Trust: Our World in Data
Trust is essential for effective cooperation. How does trust vary between different societies and locations and what matters for levels of trust?
9
Data review: ethnographic and archaeological evidence on violent deaths
What quantitative data is there about violent deaths in non-state societies?
10
Vitamin D toxicity: What if you get too much?
Understand the risks of taking high doses of this vitamin in supplement form.
11
12
The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
13
Literacy
Being able to read and write opens up the world of education and knowledge. When and why did more people become literate? How can progress continue?
14
Book Review: The Hungry Brain
[Content note: food, dieting, obesity] I. The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don’t be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is…
15
The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it
Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.
16
U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries
American students continue to rank around the middle of the pack, and behind many other advanced industrial nations, in international assessments of math, science and reading.
17
Flood Death Valley
Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water?
18
Study: Volkswagen’s excess emissions will lead to 1,200 premature deaths in Europe
A new MIT study finds excess emissions generated by Volkswagen cars sold in Germany, will likely cause 1,200 premature deaths throughout Europe. The most affected countries include Germany, Poland, France, Czech Republic.
19
Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
20
How Shor's Algorithm works (2007)
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
21
Why Cryonics Makes Sense (2016)
The more I read about cryonics—i.e. freezing yourself after death—the more I realized it's something we should all be talking about.
22
Radioactive Waste Management
Nuclear waste is neither particularly hazardous nor hard to manage relative to other toxic industrial wastes. The amount of radioactive waste is very small relative to wastes produced by fossil fuel electricity generation. Safe methods for the final disposal of high-level radioactive waste are technically proven.
23
Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes
[This post has mostly been replaced/supplanted with a more thorough analysis in Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences] I. One idea that kept coming up in the comments to the thread on signal-boos…
24
80-year Harvard study has been showing how to live a healthy and happy life
For nearly 80 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been producing data and lessons on how to live longer, happier, and healthier lives.
25
Can a Human See a Single Photon? (1996)
The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
26
Keeping David MacKay's 'Sustainable Energy – without the hot air' up-to-date
As the anniversary of Sir David MacKay’s untimely death approaches, I think we should honour his memory by trying to update Sustainable Energy as a crowd-sourced project. I have made an initial attempt to suggest how we might develop the section on photovoltaics but others will want to suggest other
27
Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
Feynman (just off centre) at Wangerooge in 1987 I started my career as a theoretical physicist, and in the late-80s I co-organised a specialist workshop on a small island, Wangerooge, off the coast…
28
LaTeX Coffee Stains (2009)
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
29
The ABC conjecture has still not been proved
Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of the ABC conjecture. I have nothing further to add on the sociological aspects of mathematics discussed in that post, but I just wanted to…
30
Insert D-Wave Post Here
In the two months since I last blogged, the US has continued its descent into madness. Yet even while so many certainties have proven ephemeral as the morning dew—the US’…