Game theory at its most useful.
What would YouTube be without non-adults (animals, babies, and, well, more animals) doing adult things?
Ruth Grant on the use of incentives:
The fact that we have invented a new verb – “to incentivize” – is an indication of how much this approach has seeped into the culture. “To incentivize” is a much narrower concept than “to motivate,” which includes incentives, inspiration, arousing curiosity, etc. Something is lost if we automatically consider only incentives when we want to influence people.
Pure talent.
Herbert Gintis, professor at UMass Amherst, spends a lot of time writing incredibly well-formed (and often funny) reviews on Amazon.
I could not figure out what Simmel was trying to say. If someone told me Simmel was parodying the Germanic idealist literary tradition of the time, I would be prepared to believe it. Here is one sentence chosen at random (p. 63): “The inorganic body is distinguished from the living one above all by this: the form that defines it is determined from outside… The organic body, however, produces its form from within.”
Well, I do declare! That is really deep and insightful. If you are about eight years old.
Nearly one in three people will be arrested by the time they are 23, a study to be published today in Pediatrics found.
From David Foster Wallace’s syllabus:
“If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they’re due, running them quickly through the computer’s Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them ‘because the ideas are good’ or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one’s ideas and the quality of those ideas’ verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding.”
[via DF]
According to the British Council, backed by many other reliable sources, about half the world’s population – 3.5 billion people – have knowledge of, or acquaintance with, “some kind of English”. And for the first time in human history it has become possible for one language to be transmitted and received virtually anywhere on the planet.
The most original modern authors are not so because they advance what is new, but simply because they know how to put what they have to say, as if it had never been said before.
- Goethe
More from this brilliant interview with Lawrence Lessig:
If you started in 1794 and looked at our Congress, and compared it to the House of Commons, the two would look pretty much the same—you have people sitting in a room for five or six hours a day while they’re in session,debating with each other, arguing about the ideas. Not necessarily that it’s the greatest of the arguments but they’re trying to do what you imagine a deliberative body would do—deliberate. Jump ahead to today, the House of Commons doesn’t look that much different, you still have sessions where everybody’s sitting there and debating, and they have question time where there’s real activity.
But switch to C-SPAN covering the U.S. Congress and it’s a completely different picture. You can’t see it, because they don’t allow the camera to pan around, but the hall is empty, people coming to speak just to C-SPAN—they’re not speaking to each other—all of the activity of negotiation and deliberation is done outside the chamber; there’s no deliberation, so you just have to ask, “Why did we create a Congress?” The framers didn’t sit down and set up a Congress so they could imagine these 535 independent contractors all arbitraging fundraising opportunities. If that’s what the institution is, then let’s just shut it down.
The question isn’t whether money is speech. The question is whether we should allow money to so dominate the political system that candidates become more focused on their dependency upon money than upon the People.