Hopefully Interesting

Joseph Henrich begins his preface to The Secret of Our Success  by going over how his path through academia led him to write this book.  He started out getting dual bachelor degrees in anthropology and  aerospace engineering.  He worked as an engineer for a while before going back to school for his doctorate in anthropology.  Luckily the math from his engineering background came in useful when he got interested in evolution, population genetics, and how the tools from population genetics could be applied to cultural transmission.  I don't think this book could have been written by someone without such a broad background. It's easy to do a bad job talking about how evolution has influenced human behavior.  It's easy to find people bloviating with evolutionary explanations about the ways men and women act differently in our society.  But clearly you won't come to any success if the supposed human universal you're trying to explain is particular...

The idea of a  Basic Universal Income  has been talked about for a long time and has gotten support from such diverse sources as  Milton Friedman  and the  Pirate Party .  The idea is that everybody basically gets money from the government every month.  If that's less than they would have paid in taxes then their taxes are reduced but otherwise they get a check.  The problem with our current system is that its possible for someone making $20k a year to lose more than $10,000 in benefits if they get a raise to $30k a year though it isn't common.  What is common is that they face a very high effective marginal tax rate on that extra $10k and the poor and rich tend to be the most likely to change their behavior in response to tax rates since the poor have more opportunities to save money by doing things other than working and the rich are making enough anyways.  And unlike salaried middle class employees poor people usually have hourly wage...

I've been having some thoughts about how the economy is regulated and the design of the institutions doing it that I've been meaning to put down in a blog post.  So here goes. I haven't read Ben Bernanke's memoirs myself and maybe I should but I've been reading various economic bloggers reactions to them.   Here is an example.  One thing that stands out to many people is that during the financial crisis the Fed was so preoccupied with the banking system that they essentially forgot that they were also the agency in charge of steering the macro economy at large, trading off between inflation and unemployment and so forth. "Nothing is as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it." It's easy to see how this could happen.  In addition to trying to steer the macro-economy the Fed is in charge of bank regulation and that was generating an enormous amount of work in 2007 to 2008.  As the subprime crisis hit bank after bank went to...

I should have put this up a few days ago but I was somewhat distracted starting my new job at  RightHand Robotics .  There are some pretty cool videos on our front page.  But on to a curated list of nifty things I found on the internet in the last month! Nature has a good list of some interesting unsolved mysteries in physics and cosmology. There are a lot of nifty things that can only be made in microgravity like foamed metal and antibiotic crystals.  Now we can add metal glasses to this as well. A lot of the time we think of conservatives as being in favor of "original interpretations" of the Constitution and liberals as being more supportive of the "living constitution" approach.  There are good reasons for that but it's worth remembering that many of the things that the Black Lives Matter protesters and others criticize about how our criminal justice system handles police immunity were "judge created law" as conservatives usually put it.  T...

Whenever we send a probe to Mars we spend a lot of effort scrubbing it to make sure that there aren't any terrestrial microbes hitching a ride to the red planet.  There's a lot of sense in doing that.  Scientists are curious as to whether Mars has any native life.  If we spread earthly bugs to Mars then it might be hard to tell if whatever we find had its origins on Mars or Earth.  But I wonder if the cat isn't already thoroughly out of the bag. Way back in '84 some scientists found a meteorite that they realized had initially come from Mars.  Some larger rock had hit Mars 17 million years ago and this future meteorite had been blasted out of the crater so hard it actually left Mars altogether.   For a very long time it orbited the sun until eventually, 11,000 years ago, it managed to land on Earth. All well and good but you'd think that any rock being blasted off a planet would be pretty thoroughly sterilized in the process.  Some years after the...

Here's  some speculation that Tesla's new Model X is mostly about developing an automated electric taxi. James Lind  pioneered medical trials in figuring out that limes can prevent scurvy.  But by 1911 the measures used to fight scurvy had become ineffective without anybody realizing it because they changed how the lime juice was prepared without checking to see if it was still effective.  Nobody knew what vitamins were and nobody was going to give someone scurvy and then see if the new preparation cured it. But in more optimistic news, this month the United Launch Alliance completed 100 satellite launches in a row with no failures.  Considering that this is rocket science and that somewhat more than one out of every 20 satellite launches fails that's really impressive.  So happy 100! In other space news that doesn't actually take place in space The Martian came out and I loved it.  It captured most of what I loved about the book, was really p...

I recently read a blog post   talking about the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular. Jai then goes on to list a bunch of examples which it would probably be worth your while to read through but that's the important part there.  It's a thing I had noticed before in a few places.  Here's a short passage from Debt: The First 5000 Years: In the early decades of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in an attempt to prove that "natives...