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There are a lot of people talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a lot of moving goalposts in such discussions. I think that everyone who wants to advocate for it should publish what they expect to happen and what specific things they consider as victory conditions. When Russia first invaded I thought they […] C Thi Nguyen wrote an interesting article about the difficulty of escaping from Echo Chambers and also mentions Epistemic Bubbles [1]. An Echo Chamber is a group of people who reinforce the same ideas and who often preemptively strike against opposing ideas (for example the right wing denigrating “mainstream media” to prevent their followers from […] The Smithsonian Mag has an informative article about the history of the game Monopoly [1]. The main point about Monopoly teaching about the problems of inequality is one I was already aware of, but there are some aspects of the history that I learned from the article. Here’s an article about using modified version of […] Currently there is political debate about when businesses should be reopened after the Covid19 quarantine. Small Businesses One argument for reopening things is for the benefit of small businesses. The first thing to note is that the protests in the US say “I need a haircut” not “I need to cut people’s hair”. Small businesses […] As a follow-up to my post with Suggestions for Trump Supporters [1] I notice that many people seem to have private definitions of words that they like to use. There are some situations where the use of a word is contentious and different groups of people have different meanings. One example that is known to […] I’ve had some discussions with Trump supporters recently. Here are some suggestions for anyone who wants to have an actual debate about political issues. Note that this may seem harsh to Trump supporters. But it seems harsh to me when Trump supporters use a social event to try and push their beliefs without knowing any […] In Australia we are about to have a federal election, so we inevitably have a lot of stupid commentary and propaganda about politics. One thing that always annoys me is the claim that we shouldn’t have small parties. We have two large parties, Liberal (right-wing, somewhat between the Democrats and Republicans in the US) and […] A lecture at LCA 2011 which included some inappropriate slides was followed by long discussions on mailing lists. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in two lists [1]. One of the noteworthy incidents in the mailing list discussion concerned Ted Ts’o (an influential member of the Linux […] I recently had a medical appointment cancelled due to a “computer crash”. Apparently the reception computer crashed and lost all bookings for a day and they just made new bookings for whoever called – and anyone who had a previous booking just missed out. I’ll probably never know whether they really had a computer problem […] I previously wrote about the case for a Basic Income in Australia [1]. Since then I read an interesting article by Rutger Bregman in the Dutch site The Correspondent discussing the benefit that such Basic Income schemes have given in various places [2], he makes a great case for giving a Basic Income to poor […] |
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