An idiot SpaceX-hating troll in a gun forum.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Lesson For Schoolchildren
Good News In The S3x Business
Life is getting harder for pimps. It may be the world’s second oldest profession, but one that has very little value added (it would have none if prostitution were legal).
Credentials Versus Education
More thoughts from Elizabeth Scalia.
When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to aspire to get an Ivy League degree. Of course, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to college, and my high school grades (and lack of even taking the SAT) showed it.
[Update a while later]
“College for all” harms students.
“I Want My Sudafed!”
Thoughts on the incremental nature of the destruction of liberty. Unfortunately, it’s like a ratchet, and it’s a lot harder to get rid of bad laws than to create new ones.
The Tree Octopus
This is a frightening commentary, not just on Internet literacy specifically, but the complete failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking. Because thinking is hard.
A Possible Explanation For Wall Street Screwups
They rely too much on credentialism in hiring:
It is odd that the soft firms, which market themselves to clients as being super-smart repositories of brainpower (of course this is largely a fiction; see point 3 above), would rely so heavily on university admissions committees. They effectively outsource a big chunk of due diligence on their most important investment (human capital) to a group of people whose judgement they somehow trust, but perhaps without detailed understanding. When I was on the faculty at Yale I knew people in admissions and it’s not clear to me that they were the best able to spot potential in 18 year olds. In studies of expert performance admissions people are less good at predicting UG GPA than a simple algorithm. (The “algorithm” is simply a weighted sum of SAT and HS GPA!)
I’m a lot less impressed by Ivy degrees than I’m supposed to be. And I think that the current occupant of the White House is a great example of why.
No Left Turns
Living without them. Having grown uplearned to drive in Michigan, I’m actually used to “Michigan left turns,” and will often make a right and then U. It really is a lot faster than waiting for traffic to clear in both directions.
[Via Geek Press]
The Puritan Political Tradition
…and the modern left:
Over the centuries, New England has changed its theology while remaining loyal to its cultural foundations. The Calvinist orthodoxy of the seventeenth century yielded increasingly to Deism and Unitarianism in the eighteenth — and Harvard officially became Unitarian in 1803, dropping its belief in the divinity of Christ. In the nineteenth century literary and intellectual New England hedged its bets, backing a range of horses from Emersonian transcendentalism to the more evangelically flavored Calvinism of the Victorian years. During the second half of the twentieth century the mind of New England became more secular than in past generations– but nothing has ever changed the deep belief in this cultural stream that, however defined, morality exists and that it is the job of the state to enforce true morals and uphold right thinking.
They’re just prudes about different things.
DIY Robots
…and memories of my youth. Let’s see if we can top the comments over there.