All posts
-
On productivity, and the risk of accidentally making the world worse when we’re trying to make it better.
If efficiency were all we were after, why bother with human consumers? Robots could grow the food, and gobble it all up, too.
-
On poetry: Erin Belieu’s ‘When at a Certain Party in NYC’
You can’t always get what you want – from your local library – but you might just find, you get what you need.
-
On the low-quality, highly-biased research attempting to dissuade you from wearing a bike helmet.
You should wear a helmet, no matter what the ill-conceived research papers claim.
-
On Akerlof & Shiller’s ‘Phishing for Phools’ and the increasing heterogeneity of the United States.
People aren’t exactly the same everywhere, but we’re all suckers. And huckersters know.
-
On paying teachers for value added.
Pay the best teachers more? Sure! But are the best teachers the ones who program their students to fill in the right bubbles?
-
On medical spending.
We spend huge amounts on medical care in the U.S., but cheaper interventions would improve people’s lives more.
-
On asking first.
I still frown every time I see the sidewalk chalkings / posters / coffee mugs / t-shirts that read “Consent Is Sexy.” I really thought that slogan would’ve faded away by now. Traditional sexual practices in the U.S. are bad, sure. The standard shown in movies and advice books is for both parties to act…
-
On Skynet, and why I’m still gung-ho about AI research despite having watched two out of four Terminator movies.
Maybe we just need an all-out war against a machine of our own creation.
-
On octopus literature, a reprise: what would books be like if we didn’t love gossip?
Of all intelligent species I know of, only the octopus evolved its mind for purposes other than keeping track of gossip.
-
On Simon Critchley’s ‘Memory Theater’ and other people’s lost time.
Long-lost artifacts trigger powerful memories … but without an explanation, they seem meaningless to others.
Frank Brown Cloud 