I recently finished reading this book and here there are some thoughts about it. A summary of the book is something along these lines: Law is useful because it provides a stable framework for social interaction. Without Law, no civilisation as we know is possible. But currently the practice of Law has become bloated, expensive, and slow. At least in the US. So this would count as one more instance of what Scott Alexander pointed out in a recent post: cost disease. Hadfield blames it on something that metaph…

Antinatalism is the view that it is wrong to bring new conscious beings into existence. Here I present and refute what seems to be the most popular arguments for it, as presented by David Benatar. The title of this post is a reference to the many ways Benatar refers smugly to his hypothetical critics, even though he himself criticises hypothetical critics of addressing his arguments smugly. I will not do that and confine my cheesy remarks to these introductory remarks. What follows is an argument from n_on-…

Collections of papers and articles that I've spotted this week that seem interesting. Comments on some of them. Psychology Sinnot-Armstrong, W. The Disunity of Morality There is no fixed region of the brain unique to moral judgement Simple explanations for morality (It is for suppressing self-interest, it is for cooperation, it serves X social purpose) are wrong Morality is like memory: many components to be individually studied. Rowley, D.A. et al. Counter-intuitive moral judgment following traumatic b…

[This post is part of the Soviet Series] In 1922, the relatively young Soviet Union was a relatively poor country recently afflicted by a civil war and a revolution. After the Second World War, the USSR was a superpower capable of stopping Germany's Wehrmacht on its tracks[1]. What happened there? Given the title, it won't come up as a surprise that Stalin happened. This post will analyse the impact of Stalin on Soviet growth, beginning with a presentation of some statistics regarding Stalin's achievements,…

Brief comments. A few days ago, Richard Spencer, who is a self-described white nationalist, though he dismisses being labeled as a neo-Nazi (Make of that what you will, google around), was punched. Relatedly, a few days ago a band beat up a girl in Murcia (Spain). After the fact, it seems -though it has not been officially confirmed- that the attackers were extreme left-wingers and that the 19 year old girl in question was a  a self-defined 'patriot' with ties to a certain extreme right-wing organisation. M…

A brief analysis of it I did: [gist]59eb902b479adebcb2b56e1a400726dd[/gist]