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The Gaslighting of Science
Final Installment of the Misinformation Trifecta
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Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 629 posts.
512
Two conspiracy theories about cola
Does cola contain a drug to prevent you from throwing up from the sugar? And is Mexican Coke somehow better than American Coke?
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AirPods as a Platform
01 Intro One of the favorite activities of tech analysts, VCs and similar Twitter armchair experts is to predict what the next big technology platform might be. The usual suspects that come up in these conversations are VR/AR, crypto, smart speakers and similar IoT devices. A new contestant th
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Has the lead-crime hypothesis been debunked?
A couple of months ago a new paper was released that examined the lead-crime hypothesis. Its conclusion is that there's little evidence for an association, and if there is one it's pretty small. I haven't commented on it, but not because of its negative conclusion. It's because the paper is a meta-analysis. I'm fairly…
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Why 'Long Rituals' Matter
The Long-termist's Field Guide: 1,000 Ideas For The Next 1,000 Years
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Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor Its Writers
This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent.
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In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics
Some thoughts on the New York Times' Slate Star Codex profile
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Crony Beliefs
[Note: if you prefer audio, you can listen to this essay narrated by Grognor on his excellent podcast Second Enumerations . —Ed. ]
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Japanese Typewriters
September 30, 2009 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Japanese History , Japanese Technology
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The Weirdness of Kentucky Route Zero (2016)
In my last post , I took issue with the TV show Mr. Robot for not being weird enough. Although imaginative and compelling, its universe is well-ordered: everything happens for a reason.
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The short tale of an online scam
How I used Python to get back at an online scammer - and what I discovered in the process
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Why Did Congress Just Vote to Break Up Big Tech?
The Judiciary Committee voted 21-20 to split up Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. What happened was unbelievable.
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The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small elite?
In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following …
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Microsoft and the Metaverse
Defining the Metaverse, and explaining why Microsoft is well-placed for the virtual reality opportunity
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“It's not peaches and cream either for men”
I spend a lot of time talking about men’s mental health because it’s what I, as a man, know about. And like with everything, the truth is complicated. We live in a patriarchal society that privileges men in certain ways, but also hurts them in other ways. The harmful effects on our heavily gendered society especially…
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Not school or homeschool, but modular learning
Meet the new wave of teachers, artists and techies who are reinventing K-12 education one kid at a time
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Pieces of Shit
I listened to this song last night.
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The origin of “tweet” at Twitter (2013)
Last week, one of my colleagues informed me that the word “tweet” was now included in the Oxford English Dictionary (see “Quiet announcement” at the end of the page.) The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a […]
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Community Banking and Fintech
How and why small, local banks power the fintech apps you use.
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EU proposing to regulate the use of Bayesian estimation
The European Commission just released their Proposal for a Regulation on a European approach for Artificial Intelligence . They finally get around to a definition of “AI” on page 60 of the report (link above):
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War Starts
22nd May 1990. The two Yemens, north and south, become one. The mood of the world seems to be for the dissolution of old animosities. In that same week, East and West Germany sign a treaty to begin reunification, the US and USSR agree to destroy their chemical weapons, and the World Health Organisation stops…
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The small web is beautiful
A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.
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Chicago Faces 135% Incr in Carjackings So Legislator Seeks to Ban GTA
My home city of Chicago continues to reel from soaring crime rates. Among the categories of increasing crime is a 135% spike in carjackings. One would think that the legislators would be focused o…
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Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a letter I wrote to their editor in response to Kevin Rudd’s exposition on Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign: