October 24, 2005
Bono shocked at Bush's intelligence (but has trouble saying that directly)
via Tim Blair
Posted by Morgan at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
When women move in with men, they gain weight
Scientists have now demonstrated this!
Posted by Morgan at 12:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Intelligence of Crowds
One of the main points of James Surowiecki's "Wisdom Of Crowds" was that large numbers of regular people could make better decisions than small numbers of experts. Left somewhat unexamined was the question of what happens to decisions when the large crowd itself gets smarter. Here are some data points to integrate:
- The Flynn Effect: "The results of intelligence tests in different countries show that over the past century average IQ has been increasing at a rate of about 3 points per decade."
- Arnold Kling's observation that the rate of economic growth/technology-innocation is doubling every decade.
- (via Speculist) SciAm reports:
Enhancing intelligence is not science fiction. Many "smart" drugs are in clinical trials and could be on the market in less than five years. Some medications currently available to patients with memory disorders may also increase intelligence in the healthy population. Likewise, few people would lament the use of such aids to ameliorate the forgetfulness that aging brings. Drugs that counter these deficits would be adopted gratefully by millions of people.
My gengeral intuition about these factors is that we should anticipate large increases in economic growth in the next deecades. I wish I had a better sense of how to invest that way. Alternatively, perhaps the correct answer is not to bother. Just assume the economy will provide and spend spend spend!
Update: I just remembered Byran Caplan's Idea Trap. The idea is that as you grow you learn better how to grow and that has positive feedback consequences. (He reflects more on the bad feedback problems, but that is less relevant here).
Posted by Alex at 11:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 23, 2005
Shanghai: pop. 17 million, but still a small town
I was not planning for a night on the town last night, but my new-to-shanghai friend Judah called asking about a gym when I was about to take my second trial visit to my local $200 (annual) Star gym (sufficient, despite lacking heavy dumbells, the ab machine I like, a calf machine, towels, and morning hours during the week). I invited him to join, and I was surprised to find not only a few other foreigners, but also a couple of friends were working out there too. That settled it for me that I should bite the bullet and join the gym, which I did.
After the workout, we bought some persimmons (I think that's what "youzi" is called in english) many oranges, and some grapes for a quick snack before showering and heading out for Indian dinner at Hazara, and then heading on to the popular Park 97. Between dinner and the club, I ran into seven distinct groups of people I knew. Not seven people, but seven groups. It was a nice reminder of how Shanghai is still a small town, despite the 17 million person population.
Posted by Matt at 02:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Hillarious Outsourcing Article
Provocative and great fun! My Outsourced Life
Posted by Matt at 01:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (20)
October 17, 2005
Life Hacking
An overview of Life Hacking, including a reference to 43folders.com and "Getting Things Done".
Posted by Lonne at 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 12, 2005
Googlebombing
Googlebombing seems to be getting more attention lately due to the high-profile Googlebomb that yields the White House home page when you type "failure" or "miserable failure" into Google. Google has taken a firm position that it will not manually adjust results to compensate for Googlebombs.
A variation on the Googlebomb is what happens when you type in "French Military Victories" into Google and use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. If you then click on the "Did you mean: french military defeats?" link from the resulting page, you are presented with a pretty good overview of the subject.
Posted by Lonne at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 10, 2005
The Purpose of Life
Someone asked me recently if the purpose of life was the pursuit of knowledge or the pursuit of happiness. It struck me as a strange question, mostly because I couldn't understand how the person had come up with those two possible answers as the only options for answering such an eternal question. It also struck me that the pursuit of happiness was much more likely to be the purpose of life than the pursuit of knowledge -- the latter of which, at best, seems to be a means of finding out what the purpose of life is, not an ends in of itself. Which led me to another thought: while few people purport to know the purpose of life, most people can do a reasonably good job of telling you which of two possibilities is more likely to be the purpose of life. For example, is the purpose of life more likely to be "finding true love" or "winning as many video games as possible"? Is it more likely to be "living an ethical life" or "tasting the tap water in as many cities as possible"? Is it more likely to be "discovering an important scientific breakthrough for society" or "achieving relative immortality through the creation of well-known pieces of art"? The answer might differ from person to person, but you might be able to get closer to an answer for yourself via a series of pairwise comparisons of various possibilities.
Posted by Lonne at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
New York Times Blog Link Tool
As suggested by Alex, the New York Times has a tool to allow blogs to link to articles without requiring that the reader pay for the article once a certain amount of time has past.
Posted by Lonne at 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 05, 2005
Social Meta-Networking System
It seems to me that consumers would get a lot of value from the integration of all the social networking sites, or at least all those that have the same basic structure and information (e.g. Friendster, MySpace, etc.). Although I've thought that about the IM systems for a while now, and they still seem to be pretty separate.
Posted by Lonne at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
