In my previous blog, I used to compile lists of interesting links. I’ll start doing that here on an irregular basis.
Scott Alexander has a new post in the “Slate Star Codex critiques social justice” series. It discusses a study which looked at the effects of coder gender on Github pull request approval. It looks like the study had fairly neutral results but was widely reported by the scientific press as proving sexism in tech. As someone who works in the tech industry, all I learned was that I need to contribute more to open source projects. If you want to get fully paranoid about social justice, read Scott’s long comment on the social justice movement on the same post (reposted to reddit).
Justice Scalia passed away this weekend. He was a big deal, whether people liked him or not, and now there’s a big political fight on whether the Republican Senate will allow Obama to appoint a nominee. I’m pretty certain (90%) that Obama will nominate someone, even if congressional Republicans say they don’t want to confirm anyone. I have no idea what the chances are of a person being confirmed. Michael Cannon at Cato says the Senate has the power to deny a nomination until next year. I bet a lot of progressives would be horrified and yell about how Obama won the election in 2012, but I think the claim is pretty solid; Congress is supposed to be the most powerful branch after all. Senators were all elected as well, and court appointees are required to have input from both the President and Senate.
It’s also interesting because I’ve been recently watching Crash Course: U.S. Government and Politics. The episode on separation of powers is relevant to our Scalia discussion.
Robin Hanson on “Why I Lean Libertarian”. His reasoning is pretty close to mine.
Amusing post on Status 451: San Francisco has a Shameful Homeless Problem.
From Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog: First-order Libertarianism, Second-Order Public Reason Liberalism. It concerns the question of whether libertarians can allow non-libertarians to set up their own society in a libertarian world.
Great introductory crypto video for public key cryptography. It discusses the discrete logarithm problem and a Diffie Hellman key exchange. That channel actually has a lot of good videos concerning encryption, although nothing explaining exactly how elliptic curve crypto works. It’s obviously dark magic.
Scott Sumner mentions a comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky on EconLog. The post is a fairly complex way of discussing the issues the Fed is facing in trying to jumpstart the economy, but it has a cool reference to Newcomb’s Paradox.
I haven’t mentioned it before on this blog, but I really hate Daylight Savings Time. It’s just so dumb. The Washington Post has an interesting article about a proposal to get rid of all timezones. It would take a huge amount of getting used to, but it seems possible. For example, in China, the entire country is on Beijing time; people out west just wake up and go to sleep later…which I’m sure they were doing already, but now they don’t need to worry about time changes across the country. I like it, but mostly because it would end Daylight Savings Time.
Old post, but interesting: How to Change Public Opinion from the Niskanen Center.