Race is arbitrary
Willem Buiter’s blog post on the arbitrariness of racial classifications are spot on. I wonder if he is too decent to realise that the whole point of the concept of race is to divide people; to provide people with a sense of belonging to a tribe. Race is purely whatever society defines it to be. Both the countries I know well, Britain and Sri Lanka, show this.
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School is hell
I never enjoyed school, but I enjoy, and have always enjoyed, learning. I would undoubtedly have done better if I had been simply taught to read and given a large pile of books, rather than being sent to school — even the extremely good school I went to.
Freedom for teenagers
In an interview with Psychology Today, Robert Epstein discusses his view that adolescents are harmed by being restricted and infantilised. This strengthens some of my views about schools and over-protective parenting, which I mentioned in my post on the lies we tell children.
Lies we tell children
After having a go at Paul Graham yesterday for writing outside is area of (considerable) expertise, I am eating my words a little by responding to just such an essay by him. It is true that many people do lie to children. This is what I think we should do.
Glib beats insightful
Paul Graham’s essay, Hackers and Painters, is very popular with some programmers. I just found a hilarious refutation of it, called Dabblers and Blowhards.
The interesting thing for me is that Paul Graham’s audience are just as enthusiastic (if not more so) when he writes rubbish about things he knows nothing about, as when he writes insightfully about things he is an expert on. (more…)
I have a No TV too
Like Oliver Steele and his family, we have a No TV. I have had one so long that I find it hard to imagine life without it, so I find it harder to assess the benefits than he does. (more…)
Sex and normality
The easy assumption that both The Guardian and Relate make when faced with men who have lost interest in sex have a medical or psychological problem seems to be to be forcing people into a mould of “normality” that is just as bad as Victorian behaviour that we would now find appalling. (more…)
MySQL: what is the problem?
MySQL’s decision to produce proprietary add-ons to its highly successful open source database has been widely misunderstood, and in some cases spun to produce the impression that it is a failure of open source. (more…)
Websites do not need to support Internet Explorer?
As much as I dislike Microsoft Internet Explorer, and as much as I wish that people would make their own lives and those of website developers better by using better web browsers, I have always taken supporting it as a necessary evil. It is bundled with Windows and most people take whatever it suits MS gives them. (more…)
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If this is the market working, what is failure?
Brain Caplan thinks markets work fine despite having to wait 19 years to be able to a product with a tiny marginal cost of production: i.e. he spent 19 years waiting on the supplier’s whims just to buy allowed to buy some music. (more…)
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