Don't just not do bad things. Do good things.
Classically, according to the Abrahamic religions, God is a man.
According to some more recent depictions, God is a woman. Which is a nice subversion.
But like, y’all are both a bit crazy. If there is an omnipotent Creator of the universe, then it definitely doesn’t have a gender.
When people call God “he” or “she”, this is what they’re saying happened:
Continue readingAn investor is considering putting her money into a mutual fund. “I will just invest some money for the next six months,” she says, “and see how it goes.”
A philanthropist is considering donating to a charity. “I will donate some money and see how it goes.”
Harvard University is considering whether SAT scores are all that important for admissions. “Let’s make SAT scores optional and see what happens.”
A child climbs to the top of a slide and is about to jump off the edge. “Don’t jump off of that,” his mom says, “you’ll get hurt.” He jumps off the slide. He gets hurt.
Not-invented-here syndrome is when an organization unnecessarily re-invents products or tools that already exist elsewhere. The cousin of this phemonenon is not-discovered-here syndrome, in which people refuse to consider evidence unless they’ve collected it themselves.
“A wise man learns from his mistakes, but a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.” Not-discovered-here syndrome is what happens when you insist on making mistakes for yourself.
Continue readingOne day, I was at my grandma’s house reading the Sunday funny pages, when I suddenly felt myself getting sucked into a Garfield comic.
Continue readingIf we are correct about the laws of physics, then ghosts can’t exist. But some people are insistent that they’ve directly interacted with ghosts. Is there a way ghosts could exist if we modified the laws of physics a bit?
Continue reading(Here is the same clip in HD, but that 2010 YouTube vibe is part of the fun)
This clip is in the running for most-mocked scene of all time, but I think it’s good, actually.
First, let’s get some things out of the way:
This scene was not written this way because the writers think their audience is dumb and doesn’t know how a keyboard works. It was written this way because of the Rule of Cool.
The Rule of Cool states: an audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief is proportional to how cool a scene is.
Continue readingPolitical advocacy is an important lever for reducing existential risk. One way to make political change happen is to support candidates for Congress.
In October, Eric Neyman wrote Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act. He created a cost-effectiveness analysis to estimate how donations to Bores’s campaign change his probability of winning the election. It’s excellent that he did that—it’s exactly the sort of thing that we need people to be doing.
We also need more people to check other people’s cost-effectiveness estimates. To that end, in this post I will check Eric’s work.
I’m not going to talk about who Alex Bores is, why you might want to donate to his campaign, or who might not want to donate. For that, see Eric’s post.
Continue readingNearly nine years after part 1, I bring three new short ideas.
Investors often say that standard deviation is a bad way to measure investment risk because it penalizes upside volatility as well as downside. I agree that standard deviation isn’t a great measure of risk, but that’s not the reason. A good risk measure should penalize upside volatility, because upside volatility is bad.
Continue readingIs it a good use of time to call or write your representatives to advocate for issues you care about? I did some research, and my current (weakly-to-moderately-held) belief is that messaging campaigns are very cost-effective.
In this post:
