Category: Politics

1. The puzzle. Why did OK Boomer take off? On Oct 29, Taylor Lorenz posted ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations. Quote: “Ok boomer” has become Generation Z’s endlessly repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it, a rallying cry for millions of fed up kids. Teenagers… Continue reading Why did boomer become an insult? Because the internet is shattering industrial era politics and culture

The lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard has produced enough evidence to prove Asian discrimination and quotas. Though perhaps not legally. This may not be obvious unless you’ve been following it. So I want to consolidate and reblog what I found convincing. Then discuss how this impacts meritocracy. Stephen Hsu has taken the… Continue reading The Asian discrimination lawsuit against Harvard won’t change admission rates. But it damages claims to meritocracy.

The primary focus of my blog is understanding how trends in technology, society and economics will unfold over the next 5-10 years. So on twitter I follow people like Nick Szabo, arguably the world’s most famous cryptocurrency expert. Last week, in regards to Syrian refugee policy, Szabo retweeted this:

The past few decades have seen a lot of excellent research into figuring out why partisan cultural battles never seem to get to agreement. Of course David Hume was on to this centuries ago, famously claiming that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to… Continue reading Dan Kahan’s cultural cognition shows why climate-splaining is a fail. Plus applying it to Paul Krugman.

The above image is from the always wonderful xkcd. It makes fun of the turing test, a test where a human tries to tell if he’s having a written conversation with a computer or another human. More recently the economist Bryan Caplan suggested an Ideological Turing Test:

Bill Keller at the New York Times has an op-ed comparing modern right wing Tea Party radicals to leftist 1960’s radicals. Not only do I think this is accurate, I think he doesn’t take his analogy far enough.

Arnold Kling has an essay out called The Three Languages of Politics. It’s an easy read, a 25 page ebook selling for $1.99. The thesis is Progressives, Conservatives and Libertarians each have distinct axes for good and evil, expressed in different languages. Progressives default to oppressors/oppressed, Conservatives to civilization/barbarism, Libertarians to freedom/coercion. This seems rather… Continue reading Demonizing along your preferred axis

The image above is taken from this nice 15 minute video interview of Jonathan Haidt (on left) by David Sloan Wilson (on right). I’m a big fan of Haidt and Wilson, and did a previous post on Haidt’s views on Republican science denialism. A key Haidt insight is a) all groups have sacred beliefs, and b)… Continue reading Atheism as a sacred belief

One exaggerated explanation for the 2012 presidential election was “Only white people voted for Mitt Romney….Or not quite only.” That’s because 88% of Romney voters were white versus 56% for Obama. And given the ongoing relative demographic decline in whites, there’s a narrative predicting a parallel decline in Republican electability. But this narrative is a partial… Continue reading Politics are driven by urbanization as much as race