snakeboy

Wow, that's awesome. Great work!

For a simple test, I searched "fall of the roman empire". In your search engine, I got wikipedia, followed by academic talks, chapters of books, and long-form blogs. All extremely useful resources.

When I search on google, I get wikipedia, followed by a listicle "8 Reasons Why Rome Fell", then the imdb page for a movie by the same name, and then two Amazon book links, which are totally useless.

It's less pleasant to work in a mask, especially anything involving manual labor or a hot kitchen.

Shoes are a bad comparison. The vast majority of people have always lived in a society where wearing shoes is the status quo. This is not the case for masks.

Speaking as another young male with no comorbidities, I do tons of reckless shit that put myself at way higher risk for no other reason than to entertain myself and my friends. So I figured I might as well get vaccinated if it's a tiny societal positive with no non-negligible risk to myself.

> ...the vaccine on the entire adult population [in France] would avert 10 deaths from Covid among 18-39-year-olds, but would be associated with 21 deaths from blood clotting in the same age grouping over the same time period.

There are ~16 million 18-39 year olds in France. So both those risks seem vanishingly small.

I'm not saying that marketing of vaccines has been honest overall, but that's just my 2 cents about "WHY in God's name I would risk taking an mRNA vaccine".

I think a big part of the anti-vax stuff is

1. "mRNA" is still new tech in the public eyes, so it'll take some time to familiarize people with it and not see it as "scary new tech".

2. Covid is (fortunately) less deadly than initially feared, which lead to people not being very worried about it at a personal risk level. If mRNA therapy start rolling out for cancer, you bet people will take it.

Wouldn't this be a good economic incentive to buy more locally? Since it sounds like currently shipping costs via trucking are ignoring this externality.

> FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs

How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge amount of new hires come in each year from fresh university graduates.

I found this page [0] (in French). I don't know how reliable this website (or my French, for that matter) is, but it seems like its a group of activists illegally squatting, damaging the property (at least changing the locks) and causing some public disturbances in the street, and the police were having a difficult time catching them. This email account was linked to the organization's Twitter account, and from there they were able to put together enough information to arrest.

[0] https://paris-luttes.info/recit-policier-de-sainte-marthe-15...

I think the original blog post [0] or Andrew Gelman's discussion of it [1] are both better sources for technical details and some historical context.

In particular, this is not the first such issue for Dan Ariely, as Gelman points out, he has a history of sketchy scientific ethics like doing media tours for studies that he knows failed to replicate.

[0] http://datacolada.org/98 [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-scandal-...

Isn't that expected? People born since 1980 grew up with those sticky habits/culture around food and exercise, and are a growing proportion of the population.

> Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.

Even though there is a good amount of redundancy, once some subtleties like the liaison are understood, French spelling to pronunciation is a many-to-one[ or two] mapping, while English is a many-to-many multifunction mess.

I'd second what the other poster said - your best bet are recommendations of blogs you like already.

Looking at my RSS feed, I'd also endorse Andrew Gelman's blog (applied stats), A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (history), and Applied Divinity Studies (rationalism à la ACX).

Off-topic, but why is it that Terry Tao's blog attracts such low-quality comments? When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized, Marginal Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive, engaged, and well-informed. With Tao, it's a huge proportion of random people asking for generic life advice, or fanboy-ism.

This seems counter-intuitive, because Tao's blog is by far the least accessible of those above 3 blogs on a technical level. There's almost no reason to visit Tao's blog if you don't have a graduate maths degree.

> Has netflix ever committed to this vision? I would be hell bored if Netflix is filled with Oscar-ish films.

I think it's a bit of straw man to conflate "the art form of film" with mainstream oscar bait.

And in the 21st century how important is the 3rd amendment compared to the 4th or 5th?

In these discussions, where there is fierce opposition on this question, wouldn't it make sense to explicitly filter for this on hiring and have some companies that look for [for lack of a better word] extroverted people, and others for introverts?

Sure if you work in an industry where you're competing among a very small pool of highly-skilled specialists, you can't afford to miss out on key talent. But if we're talking about web devs for a start-up, why not?

During various confinements over the past year, I really enjoyed "illegal" late night walks when the streets and parks were completely dead. I found it the perfect ambiance to memorize poetry. Write them out long-hand and then carry nothing but the piece of paper for reference as needed. I don't have the patience for that in any other context.

It's been a surprisingly enriching complement to my daily routine to recite them to myself later on my bike or with friends. I'd never appreciated the poetic form before Covid, and I'd seriously encourage other young folks to give it a shot, especially if your only poetic exposure was in high school.

Then even harder: How about a stay-at-home mother?

On a website uniquely designed for photo upload and forensic analysis, CSAM makes up .06% of uploads. But I'd bet on a generic messaging app, the percentage of messages involving CSAM is much, much lower.

There is the European Convention on Human Rights upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, but from my understanding these both predate the European Union, and they're not really directly associated.

Could someone more knowledgeable weigh in on what the EU has to show as far as a "human rights record" ?

I wasn't trying to imply racism ended in the 60s, to be clear!

I intentionally avoided discussing modern politics in order to make a stronger (albeit more limited) argument, by emphasizing explicit legal discrimination. Even if someone doesn't believe in systemic racism, it's not a point of debate that black people alive today were explicitly persecuted under the law based on the color of their skin.

I agree, and find it ironic that he explicitly calls his podcast a "conversation", when indeed it's the least conversational podcast around (except when he clearly really likes the person or has a strong opinion on the topic)

If they're a few generations removed from their Nigerian or Jamaican ancestors, they probably don't have strong ties to their home countries' cultures. This seems true of most Americans whose families emigrated 3+ generations ago.

"The melatonin in their skin" explicitly shaped many aspects of law, society, and culture in the US up until the 60s, which is still in living memory, so I don't think it's that surprising that there would still be measurable differences in culture and media interests.

Think about how much your parents' lives and the stories they told you are reflected in your present-day values and interests.

> but suggesting that racism is only racism when the government does it too is a first.

I think you've misunderstood this post. This is less like a "white's only" restaurant, and more like an Italian food restaurant. It's supporting a cultural niche, not excluding another.

Fair. I'm certainly not suggesting it's a realistic solution for many communities and people.

Perhaps buying at a farmers' market from local suppliers if available in your area?

For my, the most successful strategy I've found is to have a handful of academics and journalists that you trust and who cover a sufficient breadth of topics, and reading their articles/blogs/twitter feed. Then adding a few contrarians who I strongly disagree with just to challenge me a bit.

If you're not careful, you can fall into the same traps with social media as with mainstream media: 1. getting reporting from people who lack context on the issues, or 2. getting a distorted view of which issues are important.

Eh, kids from rich/educated families probably get a much smaller marginal benefit from the quality of the school since they're getting tons of extra stimulation at home (stability, parents reading to them at night, parents encouraging academic pursuits). Meanwhile lower-achieving kids benefit just from having the higher-achieving kids in the same classroom.

The equilibrium state in this scenario would be all public schools approaching equivalence, which would be a positive outcome.

Same principle as Cookie Banners. Wanting basic browsing privacy is being associated with an annoying, artificially difficult process.

That seems like a great outcome, no? Allowing room for a gradual transition to a net positive societal outcome rather than requiring some phase shift.

I like bars and hanging out in them, and it would be awesome to preserve the atmosphere with less and less alcohol consumed.