Belpoque

Good Sunday read courtesy of @slatestarcodex. Can't believe I missed this on first publication in 2024. I'm sincerely grateful to Scott for writing this, as it reflects a meditation I've been going through as of late. astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-ch…

Antimatter Trucker is finally a job title! But don’t worry, this isn’t going to be “The Wages of Fear, 2026”: “The device on Cern’s truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram …

A book isn't correct because it's a book. Books get published all the time that are wrong. Sometimes books get published that are *catastrophically* wrong. A huge step in reading comprehension is learning to engage with books as part of a larger dialogue with other books.

A side effect of modern education is the treatment of books as authoritative. The fact that something is printed in text that you can buy subconsciously makes you feel like it must have some merit. But that's not true.

@ashleevance @benspringwater Very. Some people just nailed it from the get-go.

@belpoque @benspringwater Wild isn't it?

Pandora's Vox by Humdog a.k.a Carmen Hermosillo. Eerily prescient piece of writing on the nature of Internet communities written in 1994(!) gist.github.com/kolber/2131643

@zdch @bryan_caplan @ATabarrok @tylercowen @ezraklein Solvay 1927 for blogosphere nerds.

@bryan_caplan @ATabarrok @tylercowen @ezraklein For a certain corner of the internet this is like vintage CBGB shots. I want to get a like t-shirt with the concert date.

Blast from the past. That's me, @tylercowen, @ATabarrok, and @ezraklein, among others, at Tyler's house 15 years ago.

From the legendary book The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. amazon.com/End-History-La…

A Hegelian theory of democracy differs from a Lockean one in being founded on dignity and mutual recognition, rather than individual freedom or satisfaction of desire.

This graph shows one of the many reasons the good old days were not so good. Even as late as 1870, women were losing 2 out of 5 of their children.

@RyanGeddie They would never get views, and maybe not have anything insightful once the dust settled, but a 6-month delayed take-haver would be an interesting thought experiment.

I think getting too stuck into the current discourse every time is bad for political commentators. I think it can make people shortsighted and limit their ability to have a perspective beyond the news cycle. Twitter makes this worse because it’s easy to enter the fray at any time

@JJ_McCullough once told me about an interview George Will did where he talked about the importance of trying to do a take that’s “off the news” every once in a while. I think this is good advice. I want to try and follow it at least on Twitter. In my videos when possible.

@zdch @besttrousers For all the praise of European healthcare, I'm sure there are easy-to-find articles of bodies like the NHS rejecting "life-saving treatments" that are just cut-paste jobs of UHC headlines in the U.S. These people have no idea how the systems they idolize actually work.

To a point someone (I think @besttrousers) made earlier today, a lot of political disagreements really do boil down to a misunderstanding of fact. I think a lot of M4A people think if you passed the policy, literally no one would get denied claims or services.