Top postsTop post
For some time, I’ve been collecting my favourite Wikipedia articles – presented here for your reading pleasure. I found some of these through @depthsofwikipedia, Aella, and various links aggregators, but I don’t remember which articles came from where. In killing both the patient and two other employees at the hospital,...
There are three related logical fallacies, which I call the Three Little Piggies of rationality. A strawman is when you argue against a simplified view that your opponent doesn’t have. A steelman is when you argue against a more sophisticated view than the one your opponent has. And a weakman...
Socrates and Glaucon are walking down from the Acropolis, when they encounter a stranger from a distant land. Caplan: Greetings, Socrates. Socrates: Greetings, stranger. From whence do you come? Caplan: I am from a faraway land. Socrates: Sparta? Thrace? Caplan: Much further out than that. Socrates: Where, then? Caplan: It...
On an episode of Julia Galef’s podcast, the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel said the following: > For [dreams], there was actually a literature that's very interesting where people in the '50 in the United States and the '40s thought that dreams just generally were black and white. I don't think that...
I’ve seen a lot of confusion over what precisely the term ‘observable universe’ refers to. This post is an attempt to remedy that. Crossposted from my personal website. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding. He observed that light emitted from distant celestial objects was redder than...
People (whose names often rhyme with Palcolm Sadwell) sometimes suggest replacing the admissions systems of highly selective universities with lotteries. The proposal is that universities would mark a pool of students as ‘good enough’ and then students from that pool would be accepted at random. Here are some arguments for...
Edit: I now have a comment response post for this post on my personal website. This is a (significantly updated) cross-post from my personal website. All sources are from the book unless otherwise mentioned. Bryan Caplan is an economist at George Mason University known for his wacky libertarian views about...