Lighthouse provision in Edo period Japan. Like the post-Coase literature, it reveals an interesting interplay of public and private.
Quantifying how much worse sleep deprivation makes you at writing code
The next big thing in battery technology?
A brief history of financial regulation in the US, its aims and its consequences.
Medical nihilism: dentistry edition.
Consider the maxim that everyone should visit the dentist twice a year for cleanings. We hear it so often, and from such a young age, that we’ve i…
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
What came first, God or complex societies? It has been argued in the past that religion, in the form of 'Big Gods' had served the function of a social glue that through rituals and shared beliefs promoted cooperation, enabling large scale societies. A recent study questions this narrative, arguing that complex society gives rise to 'Big Gods', and not the other way around. However, the paper doesn't test …
You might have heard people saying "I only trust the political views of people with children, because they actually have a reason to care about the long-term future, unlike non-parents" or that "I don't trust anyone's political opinion if they don't have children. I have a stake in the future that they don't." or similar.
There are two ways one could interpret this claim:
That having kids causes you to care more about the future (The most likely implied meaning)
Or, people who have kids…
World War II supposed a substantial increase in US federal R&D spending, and it may be regarded as an imperfect[1] natural experiment of what happens when you transition a country from a relatively "laissez faire" (with many caveats) model of scientific support to one where there is heavy government involvement. In addition to that, WWII may have implied a societywide forced learn by doing program. It has been argued that WWII caused GDP growth to be higher than it would otherwise have been. H…
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
The history of Venture Research, the original Emergent Ventures (ht/ Patrick Collison for the pointer)
Restoring the conditions of the pre-1970s environment would, he said, require getting rid of boundaries, deadlines, milestones, peer review, priorities and any objectives beyond exploration and understanding.13 According to Braben, starting in the 1970s, increases in public funding for science brought …
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
Nuclear fusion is coming. Back in 2014, I was showing optimism about fusion, and the deadlines given by some of those companies aiming to get at commercial power plants were somewhat too optimistic. The revised dates, four years later don't look that awful though: fusion is not always 20 years into the future anymore:
General Fusion wanted to have their reactor in 2020 (2014), now they claim commercial…