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There actually were religions founded around the philosophers. The mathematikoi were a cult of followers of Pythagoras that believed everything was Number, and they believed they c…

Is the opposite ever true — do some people publicly support truth, wisdom, and virtue to signify group membership?

I used to have similar concerns as you — how can anyone truly know what other people are like? Unless we’re doing research with the scientific method, we can only speculate unscien…

SoftBank sounds familiar… weren’t they a major investor in WeWork? With such poor investing acumen, why haven’t they gone bankrupt yet? Perhaps the $40 billion raised by OpenAI can…

Is “multimodal reasoning” as big a deal as it sounds? Does this technique mean LLMs can generate chains of thought that map to other modalities, such as sound and images?

Fair point. There’s a real difference in attitude between speculation and saving. Most people buy stocks to save for retirement, not to speculate that they’ll have enough money for…

Most people have a gambler’s mindset about the stock market: > […G]ambling in financial markets often goes undetected […] because individuals confuse their actions [i.e., speculati…

To play devil’s advocate, the US seems to have given up leadership in key areas, so it seems natural for China to play a bigger role in the world. (1) Industry. Why did the US gove…

Interesting, could a physical system exploit differences in the rate of expansion? What happens to an object as it moves from a high rate-of-expansion region to a low rate-of-expan…

Trust involves multiple factors, e.g., • Character. Is the public trusting? Are they anxious? • Framing. Is the institution described compassionately, for example, as a national ch…

You’re right—both directions are true. But my point is that only the forward (or reverse) direction of a fact may be worth knowing. We frequently only posses recall for one directi…

The author is drawing the wrong the conclusion-knowledge relationships can be asymmetric. The forward relationship of a fact (What is Tom Cruise’s favorite color? Green) may be wor…

A good analogy is ice. We all use “freezer-grown crystalline water,” but prior to the invention of refrigeration, we harvested natural ice from frozen lakes and stored them in ice …

I don’t follow—what in particular becomes destabilized?

The Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle puzzled over the same observations. Aristotle called your topic “First Philosophy” because it studies the primary substance that under…

The US is difficult to compare with other developed countries because it essentially has (1) affluent core regions and (2) poor peripheral regions. The US is essentially bimodal. T…

To play devil’s advocate, we really should ban 30 year fixed mortgages, not 5/1 ARMs. I know it sounds contradictory, but hear me out. One of the Fed’s primary methods to control i…

As an example of “bad influences” being an ancient topic, in the 1st century CE, the orator and educator Quintilian gave advice to parents in the Roman Empire wondering whether pub…

Individual states’ pay transparency laws are already applying upwards pressure on salaries across the country. My company has multiple groups in different states including Colorado…

Agreed, I think it’s currently causing problems in the US. In theory public media like PBS and NPR should address the gap, but those organizations tend to depend on donations from …

PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so ple…

> An individual who felt strongly about a single issue could hoard their credits until its moment arrives, then blow all of their saved credits on it. That would allow passionate m…

New Yorker writers are masters of their craft, so unless you have decades of experience professionally editing and writing, I recommend giving the piece at least a second chance. T…

All taxes are avoided (or illegally evaded) to some degree, and the most taxed (i.e. the wealthiest people and firms) will always have the largest incentive to avoid taxes. To redu…

I believe China will become more democratic within a decade. As China becomes wealthier, sustained growth will become more challenging. The low-hanging fruit of state-directed inve…