Between two round-trip flights to Jakarta from Boston and the order to shelter in place brought by COVID-19, I read ... a lot of stuff. Really I just spend so much of my time staring at various screens. If you need reading materials to while away your time, there are plenty of interesting stuff in the list.
- COVID-19: In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. So, now what? (How the Pandemic Will End by Ed Yong)
More on COVID-19: (click the triangle to reveal)
- How to Talk About the Coronavirus by Liz Neeley
- Strange COVID-19 Bedfellows: Gnawing Anxiety and Under-Reaction
- It Will Probably Go Pandemic, and We Should All Prepare Now. Suggesting things people can do to prepare for a possible hard time to come doesn't just get them better prepared logistically. It also helps get them better prepared emotionally. It is better to get through this OMG moment now rather than later.
- America Is a Sham: Policy changes in reaction to the coronavirus reveal how absurd so many of our rules are to begin with.
- The coronavirus did not escape from a lab. Here's how we know.
- COVID-19 Is The Best Argument Yet For A Wealth Tax
- $13 Cross Country Airfares! But Why Are Airlines Pricing Below Marginal Cost?
- Flatten the Curve of Armchair Epidemiology
- Rebuttal to John Ioannidis' opinion piece about the coronavirus pandemic
- Covid Observations from Beijing, March 11
- Climate Change: It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough. Indeed, absent a significant adjustment, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. (The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells)
More on the environment and science:
- The pesticide industry’s playbook for poisoning the earth: a sophisticated information war
- 'Like sending bees to war': the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession
- Astrophysical Classics: What did Newton actually discover in quarantine?
- No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay In The Air
- A World Without Pain: “I know the word 'pain,' and I know people are in pain, because you can see it. I've seen pain, what it does, but I'm talking about an abstract thing.” Cameron does not have neuropathy: she can feel all the sensations the rest of us do, except pain.
- When We're Wrong, It's Our Responsibility as Scientists to Say So. We tried to reproduce our 2012 paper on how to make people report their income more honestly—and we ended up refuting it
- E.O. Wilson on Becoming a Great Scientist
- The best thing you can do to fight COVID-19 is nothing. Stop writing that paper. Don't put it on the arxiv.
- The Unequal Impact of Indonesia's New Year Flood
- the Nugent Lab Carbon Policy
- India is not really a country. It is a continent. More complex and diverse, with more languages, more nationalities and sub-nationalities, more indigenous tribes and religions than all of Europe. Imagine this vast ocean, this fragile, fractious, social ecosystem, suddenly being commandeered by a Hindu supremacist organisation that believes in a doctrine of One Nation, One Language, One Religion, One Constitution. (Intimations of an Ending by Arundhati Roy)
More from India, Afghanistan, Angola, Iran, Singapore, and Syria:
- A mosque on fire, shops looted, people celebrating: My five hours in northeast Delhi
- THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS: AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.
- How Angolan ruler's daughter used her status to build $2bn empire
- Challenges and Pitfalls of the Technocratic Art by ADAM GARFINKLE. Having succeeded beyond its expectations, Singapore doesn’t seem to know what to do next—except to keep on driving ahead, pedal to the metal.
- War by other means: Syria’s economic struggle
- Was Killing Suleimani Justified? by Peter Singer
- Kepulangan WNI Eks-ISIS: Seberapa Jauh Media Membantu Publik Memahaminya?
- Conrad Bastable: Germany is a major outlier among high-GDP developed nations and nobody talks about it
More from Conrad Bastable, Agnes Callard, and on rationality:
Agnes Callard:- The Problem with Letters of Recommendation: The kind of positive feedback sought at a letter request cannot mean much, precisely because it has been asked for; what matters has been freely given all along, and it has taken the form not only of approval and encouragement but, more importantly, of spontaneous reactions such as excitement, interest, curiosity, surprise, joy, amusement and, yes, pride.
- Who Wants to Play the Status Game?
- The End is Coming
- The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier?
- Steelmanning Free Speech: An Argument for Unfettered Content
- Steelmanning Censorship: An Argument for the Removal of Content
- Seeing the Smoke: COVID-19 could be pretty bad for you. But the worst thing that could happen is that you're seen doing something about the coronavirus before you're given permission to.
- Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real? If Rationality made you 25% more successful it wouldn't be as obviously visible as Scott thinks it would be. In this 25% world, the most and least successful people would still be such for reasons other than Rationality. And in this world, Rationality would be one of the most effective self-improvement approaches ever devised. 25% is a lot!
- Growth and the case against randomista development
- Coding: My "refactoring" was a disaster in two ways: Firstly, I didn't talk to the person who wrote it. Rewriting your teammate's code without a discussion is a huge blow to your ability to effectively collaborate on a codebase together. Secondly, nothing is free. My code traded the ability to change requirements for reduced duplication, and it was not a good trade. (Goodbye, Clean Code)
More on econometrics and coding:
- Politics: I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories. What I'm doing, that isn't politics. (Politics is for Power, Not Consumption by Eitan Hersh)
More on politics, sexuality, and history:
- ‘You're a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump's stunning tirade against generals
- Queer Like Pete: For all the talk of diversity, LGBTQ equality, and representation of gays in the media, many Americans still have limited exposure to gay men. A subspecies they aren't as familiar with, however, are the Type A, politically driven, never-take-their-eye-off-the-ball gays—a group of which Pete Buttigieg is an extreme example.
- Dear Therapist: I'm Afraid My Boyfriend's Sexuality Will End Our Relationship. He says he's bisexual, but I'm worried he's actually gay.
- Dear Therapist: I Will Probably Take the Secret of My Sexuality to the Grave
- Was Majapahit really an empire?
- Global Romans (1). The classical world through post-colonial eyes It is kind of ironical how we, in the Netherlands, and in larger parts of North-Western Europe (never mind North-America), have somehow decided, long ago, that our collective historical narratives start from Greece and Rome, far away in the Mediterranean. In a way, we have artificially appropriated a past that is wholly or partially unrelated to the land where our families come from and we have made it our own.
- Perempuan di Singgasana Majapahit
- Writing: I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me. (Writing grant applications)
More on communication and writing, a fiction and a poem:
- How to Write the Introduction of Your Development Economics Paper
- Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time. Internal communication based on long-form writing, rather than a verbal tradition of meetings, speaking, and chatting, leads to a welcomed reduction in meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities to interrupt and be interrupted.
- And All the Trees of the Forest Shall Clap Their Hands BY SHARON HSU
- Poem of the week: Antidotes to Fear of Death by Rebecca Elson
- Technology and Miscellaneous: On a social media platform in 2019, a message from a single human can fan out, unfiltered, and reach thousands of others in minutes. This is a very strange superpower!! It can be fun, but there's an edge of danger to it, too… a runaway train kind of feeling. Here's a simple solution: Cool it down. (Rosegarden: A thread from a fictional social network.)
More on tech and miscellaneous:
- How to Build a Low-tech Internet
- Facebook's Id Is Showing: An executive's leaked memo suggests that the company wants to return to the pre-Trump world. "It reshapes people's behavior and companies' investments, and then is surprised when that changes the system. It's silly to say you can't change the way a river flows when you are the watershed."
- WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism
- Survei Gaji IT (Tanggapan)
- There's an Entire Industry Dedicated to Making Foods Crispy, and It Is WILD
- The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver
- Daftar entri KBBI
- A list of ten ways we are decadent and a (speculative) theory about why it might not matter
- That idea [of dark humor] really only works if you are the one who is suffering from what is being joked about and you are taking ownership of that pain and suffering.
No comments:
Post a Comment