The Snail Shell

We teach kids (intentionally or not) that they are a "self." Let's leave aside the question of how to teach them that there...

1. Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse . I'm enough of a hippie to think you should actually just pay them without measurin...

like Uber. Your "boss" is an algorithm that says "you get 4.7* or above, you can keep working; if not, you're fired....

I am just signal boosting an SSC post again, but in particular I like his rules for a debate. He calls it a "purely logical debate...

Here is an uncomfortable fact of working life: Alice: I think X. Bob: are you sure? Charles: what about Y? Dave: I don't know, I d...

I remember reading something about how sincerity, not irony, is the ethos of our generation. (oh, here it is .) (set aside for a minute ...

It would be pretty fun to look back and think "here's what I thought at 20, 25, 30, 35, etc", for two reasons: 1. it would p...

Life Hacks by Dan Tasse 1. Call your book "Life Hacks" so people will buy it 2. Be kind of glib so people will continue readi...

I am not sure what it will be called. Perhaps Tati should name it. It is hers now, after all. And it's totally great. This is my f...

Considerations on cost disease Very many of our arguments should indeed be prefaced with "Look, really our main problem is that all...

(and no, this blog hasn't been taken over by a spam bot. I guess consider it somewhere between Oblique Strategies , 43 Simple Ways to S...

Your daily bad news is this podcast . The CBP has become the country's largest federal police force, routinely secretly violating peo...

Especially these days. Grad school's already taken its toll on my ability to blog with any regularity, but you throw in Voldemort an...