Air conditioning lets you use your brain more Students do worse when its hot. Over 13 years in NYC alone, "upwards of 510,000 exams that otherwise would have passed likely received failing grades due to hot exam conditions," and these failures delayed or stopped 90k graduations!

Utopians think their idealism is a sign of greater imagination—an ability to envision how much better the world could be. But really, they lack imagination, as they can’t envision how much worse the world could be—and there are far more ways for the world to be worse than better.

Your future is constantly shrinking, so the longer you spend preparing for it, the smaller it's going to be.

Gurwinder The sooner you do this thing you've been putting off, the sooner you'll be living in a reality where you've done it.

Strange that we know how easily doctors in the past were corrupted by the prevailing fashions of the age, yet we still put blind faith in them today. (Lesson: assume medical professionals know more than you, but also assume that they know very little.)

One of the greatest contributors to declining cancer rates was the public health campaign against smoking 🚭

A useful thing Twitter taught me is that rude people are almost always stupid. In virtually every case, when someone viciously insults me for something I said, they also misunderstood what I said. This makes sense, because rudeness and stupidity share a root cause: carelessness.

🇬🇧 IM 🇬🇧 “A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.” ― Bertrand Russell

This is why AI art won't ever be as valuable as human art; people don't just buy a product, they also buy the story behind it.

I'm always interested in how controversial historians and political scientists (on the left and right) selectively wield the concept of agency. The easiest way to revise history is to assume highest agency for your villain and lowest agency for your anti-villain. So you get -

Why poverty is not a major cause of violent crime: within-individual studies In a previous post, I reviewed multiple causally informative lines of evidence regarding the well-known association between poverty and violent crime. I concluded that poverty has little to no causal

A chief cause of delusion is the need for certainty. Just as the thirst for water may drive a desert wanderer to chase mirages, so the thirst for answers makes us rush into poorly justified beliefs. To avoid being duped, become comfortable with uncertainty.

When I feel my faith in humanity slipping, I think of this email Steve Jobs sent to himself as he was dying.

Social media seems to show you the world, but really just shows you your revealed preferences; the people you follow, the topics you engage with. It’s a mirror disguised as a window. So if you dislike the reflection, don’t blame the glass — change the person who’s gazing into it.

Humanitarians often talk of tackling the “root causes of poverty”, but poverty doesn’t have a root cause; it is the natural state of existence. The real question is, what causes prosperity?

Some people refuse to change their mind because they’re afraid to admit they were wrong. Their fear of looking stupid makes them actually stupid.

"If the news is fake, imagine history." —Amused Chimp 🇺🇸

During the "groomer" panic, I posted a poll asking for an estimate of the percentage of all public school teachers who fit the aggressively-rainbow-signaling "blue-haired and nose-pierced" type. Most of the respondents believed it was at least 40%. (It's probably closer to 1%.)

Good observation. Causes of poverty is like asking about causes of darkness. It’s the absence of energy/input. Why are people unable to create prosperity? This is a key shift. It allows us to talk about barriers and also assumes people must exercise creative agency.