Links

Politics/religion:

• “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy”, Woodberry2012 (popular media coverage; rebuttal showing that missionary choices of location were not random: Jedwab et al 2018)

• “An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa’ida in Iraq”, Bahney et al 2010; “$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida [in Mali] records every expense”

• “The lost history of Helmand” (failed nation-state building project in Afghanistan which exemplifies Scott’s Seeing Like A State)

• “The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse”

• “Secret without Reason and Costly without Accomplishment: Questioning the National Security Agency’s Metadata Program”, Mueller & Stewart2014

• “Aztec Political Thought” (the king as Enemy and Mocker, leader of a theatre state)

• “Hallucinated Gods” (on Julian Jaynes’s book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)

• “Thank God for Cancer”

Business:

• “Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan”, Fryer & Levitt2007 (discussion)

• “Inside the World of the Double-Crossing Fake Hitman”

• “A Dolphin’s Tale: The Story of GameCube” (history)

• “Death at the Summit” (Intrade)

Literature:

• “Dwarf Fortress: A Marxist Analysis” (discussion)

• “The Gooseberry Fallacy”: on ‘living like a dead man’ (Russian literature & thoughts on the good life & the moral imperative of economic growth; applicable to the anti-humanism in contemporary environmentalism & leftism)

• “…But for Me, It Was Tuesday” (TvTropes)

Medicine:

• “Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know”

• “Aretaeus On Bipolar Disorder” (ancient-Greek/psychiatry comparison)

• “Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations” (on vitamin D & niacin)

Statistics:

• “Bayes’ Rule and the Paradox of Pre-Registration of RCTs”

• “Josef Urban on Machine Learning and Automated Reasoning”

• “Using deep learning to listen for whales”

• “Adversarial Bandits and the Exp3 Algorithm”

• “A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning”, Domingos2012 (nice guide to ‘common sense’—data cleaning, modeling, overfitting, bias/variance, combining models, representation & learnability)

• “The Median is Not the Message”, Gould (on cancer survival and interpreting statistics)

• “Adventures in the Assessment of Animal Speed and Morality”

• “Posterior-Hacking”

• “Visualization Series: Using Scatterplots and Models to Understand the Diamond Market”

Technology:

• “A Future Of Pipes” (the future of cities and computing power: cooling is a big deal but not a fatal problem)

• “Auto Correct: Has the self-driving car at last arrived?”

• “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Mnih et al 2013

• Command-line folklore: the sort --key trick

• “Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery”, Mickens

• “The Slow Winter”, Mickens

• “The Night Watch”, Mickens

• “The Graph of Math”

Rationality:

• Best of Rationality Quotes2013

• “Lily Allen & decision theory” (Bitcoin)

• “Lullaby Language”

Misc:

• Subreddit: “Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things”

• Ship’s cat

• Israel-related animal conspiracy theories

Books

Nonfiction:

• The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Jacques Hadamard (1945; review)

• The City of Falling Angels, Berendt (2000; review)

• Six Memos For The Next Millennium, Italo Calvino (1985)

Fiction:

• Diaspora, Greg Egan

• I Am A Cat, Natsume Soseki

Manga:

• Oyasumi Punpun (see TvTropes; dark and depressing—worth a reread but not sure I can bring myself to do it)

Film/TV

Film:

• Computer Chess (great world-building for a plot that did not deserve it)

Anime:

• Toradora

• Watamote (review)

• The Garden of Words (review)

• Little Witch Academia (review)

• Hataraku Maou-sama! (review)

Music

Touhou:

• “上海tea” (堕悪祭怪&昼; ‘⇔LIGHT’ {R5}) [electronic]

• “パンザマスト (instrumental)” (“o ben to box”; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental]

• “けろけろハッピー” (堕悪祭怪&昼; ‘XXXXX EX STAGE R-21’ {C78}) [trance]

• “イケナイ子守唄” (堕悪祭怪&昼; ‘いやしサンドバッグ’ {東方不敗小町5}) [trance]