Links for March 2025
– personal
- How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers by Engineer’s Codex (2023-09-15). Keep it simple, stupid.
- Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist by Scott Alexander (2025-02-26). A masterful takedown of the theory that political disagreements are only or primarily about material conflict. Scott proposes a psychological theory as his alternative, which I think is pretty much correct if it’s supplemented by realism about the heritability of political inclinations and behavior.
- Most Externalities are Solved with Technology, Not Coordination by Maxwell Tabarrok (2025-03-14). Coordination-based solutions are still important, just overrated. I’d add that coordination-based solutions do not require a coercive monopolist of force and authority, but I’d be screaming into the void yet again.
- Cognitive evolution in eastern Eurasia by Peter Frost (2025-02-08).
- Three articles by Emil Kirkegaard:
- Bayesian hereditarianism (2025-02-21). If you use Bayesian reasoning, you should favor hereditarianism.
- Why are female intellectuals crazy? (2025-02-12). Here he presents a speculative model of sex differences among people with statistically uncommon beliefs, which answers the title question.
- People did not used to marry early in the good old times (2025-02-28). Arctotherium touched on this point in his in-depth article about the Western European Marriage Pattern.
- Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God’s Existence by Scott Alexander (2025-02-19). Disclaimer: I’m not quite convinced by the theory.
- Supplement with Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe (2025-02-21). Scott dismisses most of the criticisms, but I think some have merit.
- Three articles by Michael Huemer:
- An Introduction to the Problem of Authority (2025-02-22). A brief summary of his intuitionist case for libertarianism.
- Are Men and Women Different? (2025-02-01). Yes, obviously.
- The Theory of Love (2025-03-15).
- Can Systems Stop Culture Drift? by Robin Hanson (2025-02-27).
- Only About 40% Of The Cruz “Woke Science” Database Is Woke Science by Scott Alexander (2025-02-14). He’s mostly right, but the point is that it’s bad that the US government was incentivizing assertions of wokeness, even if superficial, to get grants. Also, the government shouldn’t be giving grants for scientific research anyway.