Rotundus.com

What For?

"In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century"

‘Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’

"Get this: Amazon has a patent for a system to analyze the video footage of private properties collected by its delivery drones and then feed that analysis into its product recommendation algorithm. You order an iPad case, a drone comes to your home and delivers it. While delivering this package the drone’s computer vision system picks up that the trees in your backyard look unhealthy, which is fed into the system, and then you get a recommendation for tree fertilizer. There is tremendous value in the data that can be collected from the sky and people will seek to take advantage of that data."

Gender Stereotypes Have Changed: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of U.S. Public Opinion Polls From 1946 to 2018

"Belief in competence equality increased over time, along with belief in female superiority among those who indicated a sex difference in competence. Contemporary gender stereotypes thus convey substantial female advantage in communion and a smaller male advantage in agency but also gender equality in competence along with some female advantage."

An economist friend in the White House, 10 years ago:
"At my university, when people would ask me an economics question, I would answer, and they would say, 'Thank you.' In government, when people ask me an economics question, and I answer, they respond, 'You're an a--hole.'"

— Cass Sunstein (@CassSunstein) July 20, 2019

It seems worth noting, to add a little context, that Sunstein ran the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for the first few years of the Obama-era, and at least per a Harvard press release in 2018 is by far the most-cited legal scholar in the US.

He's probably best known for "nudging", but some of his other research interests I think are at least as interesting and which may explain some of the blowback he's gotten. I'm thinking here of things like availability cascades and preference falsification (though the latter is better associated with former coauthor of his, Timur Kuran). If you're interested in trying to get an overview of his thought, he was recently a guest on the 80000 hours podcast discussing How Change Happens. He's also almost certainly the highest profile academic to have written for Quillette¹, where he published Conformity and the Dangers of Group Polarization, an excerpt from a recent book of his.

Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight

"A belief exists in the United States about public support for NASA’s human spaceflight activities. Many hold that NASA and the cause of the human exploration of space enjoyed outstanding public support and confidence in the 1960s during the era of Apollo and that public support waned in the post-Apollo era, only to sink to quite low depths in the decade of the 1990s. These beliefs are predicated on anecdotal evidence that should not be discounted, but empirical evidence gleaned from public opinion polling data suggests that some of these conceptions are totally incorrect and others are either incomplete or more nuanced than previously believed. "

China’s Marxist Tyranny Shouldn’t Be Ignored

A quote to ponder: "Because totalitarianism is often imagined as a decidedly 20th-century phenomenon, the notion that it can exist in a place as outwardly modern as China — with its skyscrapers and flat-screen TVs and high-speed rail lines — is sometimes hard to process. Yet the great totalitarian regimes of the past existed in what once seemed impressively futuristic societies, too. Indeed, this was a key element of their appeal."

Fantastic arctic fox: animal walks 3,500km from Norway to Canada

Technically from the Svalbard islands rather than continental Europe but still crazy!

Ranting about “broken” systems full of seemingly very dumb people is a sign you’re in a complex system and not dealing well with it because you’re bringing non-complex-systems thinking to your experience. Ranting may help force system to do what you want but it will cost you.

— Venkatesh “Tactical in LA” Rao (@vgr) June 21, 2019

The whole thread is worth reading.