Things which are in the pudding
By Dave Gottlieb | March 1, 2010
- The proof
- The proofs
- The divine right of kings
- The check in the mail
- The dentures
- The strychnine
(Inspired by Menand quotation at the end of this article.)
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Health Care Reform I would vote for
By Dave Gottlieb | February 28, 2010
A pigovian tax or similar supply-control on anti-biotic use.
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Read recently: Never Let Me Go
By Dave Gottlieb | February 18, 2010
I had so many thoughts about this . . . but now I’m just tired and burnt out and want to make a note that I read it before I forget.
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Working in an office — the first 3 months!
By Dave Gottlieb | February 12, 2010
I’ve never worked in an environment like this (/ a day in my life), so there are lots of novelties. Here are some things I’ve learned.
- It sucks when you bump into people in the bathroom.
- Free food and sitting down can make you fat if you’re not careful.
- It’s very easy to take most of your meals in the office.
- When you share an office, farting is a problem.
- Your office space can become a mess pretty quickly.
- Two monitors are better than one.
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The missing link . . .
By Dave Gottlieb | February 7, 2010
. . . between extremists and crazy people, the belief that rightness is so fragile that a warmed-over TV comedy can destroy it. See.
Honestly I think this is very robust.
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Nutritional Sludge
By Dave Gottlieb | January 27, 2010
There’s a pop-sci-fi trope that the food of the future is a nutritional sludge that is tasteless or unpleasant but meets or your health needs. The truth is likely to be somewhat opposite. Nutritional sludge could be made somewhat tasty, with inexpensive flavor science — like processed foods today. But it would probably not be healthy, because making healthy foods from elementary ingredients turns out to be a much harder problem than previously believed. You could have a sludge that was rich in the macronutrients believed to be essential, but that doesn’t and may never measure up to “real food.”
People subsisting on nutritional sludge might survive but find themselves feeling out of it in various ways etc. I don’t know if there’s any real science on this. . . .
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Read recently: Burr, The Final Solution, Aegypt, Logicomix
By Dave Gottlieb | December 30, 2009
Possibly some other stuff. Since I’ve started working, though, I’ve had less time to read and less time to write / think about books. Shame.
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Did Fake Steve Jobs break the law?
By Dave Gottlieb | December 16, 2009
You may have read the recent Times story that says Apple, not AT&T, is to blame for users’ network woes. Fake Steve Jobs sure did, and he’s furious. In response, he invented a nefarious counterattack by Apple. Called “Operation Chokehold,” it was a plan to get iPhone users to all hop on the AT&T data network at the same time and start downloading lots of stuff, in the hopes of overwhelming the network and compromising its effectiveness. This initially fictional DDOS seems to be gaining traction with iPhone users in the real world, and it seems conceivable that it will actually occur and actually interfere with AT&T service.
This sort of thing is sometimes treated as a crime. I think there have been prosecutions of people who used essentially similar techniques to bring down corporate websites. Since this could bring down an essential service — the phones — it seems like it might be even more legally serious. I don’t know anything about the laws that are usually applied in DDOS cases, but if I was Fake Steve I’d be a little worried that my game had got out of hand.
Note that this post is pure speculation and doesn’t constitute legal advice; I have no expertise in the relevant law and am posing these questions only as an interested commentator.
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What does “offensive” mean?
By Dave Gottlieb | December 14, 2009
I’m sure this is a banal observation but: what does it mean to call something offensive? It’s not to say that onesself is offended, necessarily. It doesn’t simply mean that someone somewhere would be offended. It could be like that a reasonably large number of people somewhere would be offended, but that doesn’t ring true to me.
Rather, I suspect it means that someone somewhere is normatively entitled to be offended. So something is offensive even if no one nowhere would be offended, if they could rightly be offended. Likewise, something may not be offensive even if many people are offended, if they are wrong to be offended (ex: “Sarah Palin is not qualified to be VP”).
If this is true, though, the normative theory that determines the content of “offensive” is somewhat opaque. Arguably we should be more open and specific when using “offensive” in this sense. It usually means something like, it unfairly denigrates some group (NB “unfairly” stands in for a moral theory); compare to the contemporary usage of “to discriminate.”
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Diversity speakers and the nerds etc.
By Dave Gottlieb | November 8, 2009
A couple outside diversity consultants spoke to us at work last week, and I got the chance to talk with them a little after their session. I wanted to share an observation: the “diversity industry” seems to be populated mostly with “Harvard MBA” personalities (I was sucking up a little) — ambitious, warm social butterflies — because they’re the kinds of people who become consultants and paid speakers. Accordingly, they are blind to an important kind of diversity among people: diversity of personality type and cognitive style. When two socially fluent people from different racial or ethnic backgrounds engage and hit it off, that’s great — but what about the kind of people who just don’t relate to others that way, no matter their background? What about the nerds?
Part of the discussion touched on the kinds of excuses and defenses people use to protect their unconscious biases: “I only care about ability, not background,” etc. These can indeed be excuses, wholly or partially. But sometimes they are also the sincere and true plea of someone who just sees the social universe differently.
This is not a fully formed idea, and when I was talking to the diversity folks I often found myself not sure what I was saying. But I feel like socially super-fluent people are so overrepresented in the “diversity” stakes that it must have distorting effects.
I passed on my recommendation of Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy.
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