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Progress - Jonah Norberg About why the world is really getting better. https://oneworld-publications.com/progress-hb.html

My amateur psychologist take is that start up 'nerds' like the alcohol heavy culture because they were probably excluded from drinking with popular peers at school, and this is their chance to show they really are 'cool'.

This may just be an effect of unhealthier diet in lower social classes, who are more likely to be less educated.

Unfortunately America seems to believe in the 'Myth of the Strong Leader', and it has led them to elect the worst president in recent memory.

From what I've read, start up workers seem to socialise exclusively with one another.

Hmmm... I think this article is politically motivated and misrepresents the evidence in a number of ways. IQ is a real, accurate measure of ability- it isn't a propaganda tool designed to legitimate inequality. IQ isn't a perfect measure of intelligence, but it is a pretty good approximation. IQ is around 50-80% heritable, which explains the inequality of mental ability and therefore income.

There are problems of 'old boys' clubs' which keep top jobs limited to middle class networks. Highly intelligent kids from middle class families still feel intimidated from applying to the best universities. However, it is important not to let partisan biases affect your views of this topic.

One possible solution to this problem is to use a crowdworking platform like Mechanical Turk to delete low quality comments. This is a lot cheaper than employing dedicated moderation teams, but there is a trade-off in that more low quality comments will slip through the net.

I think if you're getting mostly garbage comments, it should give you pause for thought. Yes, the format of the internet doesn't encourage thoughtful, polite comments. But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice.

For all of you reading whose political knowledge is a little rusty, here is a quiz for you: https://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/how-well-do-you-know-b... Unfortunately there is no reward for correct answers!

I tend to be skeptical of claims that bilingualism improves any mental skill. The studies often fail to control for confounding variables correctly. See this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-battl...

Interesting finding. One of the problems with voting is that there is no incentive or a very small incentive to choose the candidate with the best policies, because the chance of your vote making a difference is so small. Therefore people vote for a candidate that makes them feel good, rather than a competent one. This is arguably the cause of many bad policies. Caplan discusses this issue in his book 'The Myth of the Rational Voter' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter

I must admit I hadn't thought of Las Vegas as a champion of sustainability, but maybe I should revise my views.

Like most attempts to revolutionise the web I don't think that this project will succeed, but I hope to be proved wrong.

I think it will be an uphill struggle to try and persuade people that they should buy less stuff today rather than more.

Pain is probably the same in humans, animals, and even robots, that is to say a bad thing that should be minimised. So I would be very wary of programming AI to feel pain. See this tweet: https://twitter.com/webmasterdave/status/793408981121269760

If we implemented a carbon tax which makes oil producers pay for the environmental cost of oil, oil demand would probably peak even sooner.

I'd be interested to hear how this very website's basic income trial is going: www.qz.com/696377/y-combinator-is-running-a-basic-income-experiment-with-100-oakland-families/