Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting. Economics Are US companies too short-term oriented? No A somewhat skeptical writeup by Noah Smith here I wrote about this here Also at the ASI Summing up Noah Smith's thoughts on macroeconomics How important was colonial trade for the rise of Europe? Estimating the social return to higher education: evidence from longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional data I believe that higher education is to a g…

I lost some time arguing with a bunch of these climate change skeptics, and I thought it would be interesting to share what happened here for future reference. To give you some context, this happened in a political debate FB group. Someone posted a comment praising Trump for walking out the Paris Agreement. I immediately commented that global warming is real, and that it is man-caused. This was met by the following: Someone posted a picture of varying levels of CO2 throughout the millenia (Starting 600 mil…

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting. Physics A defense of the reality of time Is inflationary cosmology science? Technology Boom: The future of supersonic flight? Sergio Canavero: Will his head transplants roll? Lockheed compact fusion reactor design about 100 times larger than first plans UK Tokamak Energy startup has a test fusion reactor Philosophy Acton, deontology, and risk: Against the multiplicative model Assessing Greene's Epist…

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting. Psychology Why more highly educated people are less into conspiracy theories Neural correlates of political attitudes: emotion and ideology in the brain Perhaps less dissimilar than initially thought Education as liberation? Education may increase political violence in poorer countries? Child SES does not explain the IQ-mortality gradient In Norway Analytic cognitive style and cognitive ability …

I got some replies in my previous post about consciousness. Here I reply to those, and add a few more thoughts about consciousness. Comments from David Pearce are deliberately ignored, as I will devote a full post to his proposed solution to consciousness in a future post. Identity theory and functionalism Commenter Simon disagrees with me on my characterisation of identity theory (under which functionalism will fall). Note that I didn't discuss functionalism in my previous post. Functionalism can be unders…

I'll be moving to London next May for a new job in Data Science. This means if you live there you may suddenly see me walking around absentmindedly thinking about my next blog post. Or something. Next post will be a followup to my post on consciousness. After that one, no more philosophy for a while, and I'll blog on something TBD, one strong candidate is the history of the railway system in Japan, the history of Embraer, or the fall of the Soviet Union. Or maybe about supersonic aircraft. There's also a ha…