"… In particular, the fetishization of autonomy, self-reliance, and progress through mechanical engineering — echoing the desire to escape the suffocating social conditions back east by simply running away — utterly undermine the program itself and are incompatible with life in a space colony (which is likely to be at a minimum somewhat more constrained than life in one of the more bureaucratically obsessive-compulsive European social democracies, and at worst will tend towards the state of North Korea in Space)."

"What makes you think that once we write that text we “simply have to write because we’re writers,” that we’ll be compelled to put it somewhere where you can read it?"

"Presumably, this isn’t the book the libertarians have read, so I assume there must exist another of the same title."

"Personally, if I believed in Republican/Austrian School/Libertarian, I'd either be putting a heck of a lot of time and effort into explaining why the results don't apply, or, if I could not come up with a home run explanation, I'd give up my views.…The fact that members of these dogmas don't know or care that reality doesn't fit their beliefs makes me a bit leery of other things they believe in as well. And yet, Republican/Austrian School/Libertarian is now the dominant paradigm. Even most Democrats believe cutting taxes, for instance increases growth - they just feel that even so, in most cases, the non-growth related benefits of keeping taxes higher (say, to pay for certain programs) makes it worth not cutting taxes in many instances."

"Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?
There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. Most people know it’s a myth, of course; they subscribe to a more nuanced view in which scientists are as petty and vain and human as anyone (and as egotistical as any therapist or financier), people who use scientific methodology to tamp down their human imperfections and manage some approximation of objectivity."

"An Informative Build is a build that tells us what the state of our development is so that we can make an informed decision. We need an informative build, because otherwise Continuous Integration is just a waste of our time.

That’s right, I said Continuous Integration is a waste of time. It is a waste of time, because simply running a build doesn’t help us unless that build can also tell us what we need to do. An Informative Build:

Fails when something is wrong, letting us know that our system is broken and we must fix it.
When it fails it tells us precisely why it failed so that we know what we have to do to fix it.
When nothing is wrong it doesn’t fail. We shouldn’t be wasting cycles chasing down errors due to brittle tests or external dependencies."

"3. Accountants like double-entry bookkeeping and balance sheets and stuff so they can keep track of things. They like to record assets on one side, and liabilities on the other side, to make sure that everything adds up, to check that everything's been properly recorded. So they like to list currency as a liability of central banks (even though it isn't, because there's no promise to redeem it, or pay interest on it), and assets on the other side. An accountant would freak out if he recorded currency as a liability and couldn't find an equivalent value of assets. He would say that the central bank is a Ponzi scheme. Which of course it is. And it's just not worth the hassle of trying to explain to accountants that some Ponzi schemes are sustainable, really."

"Justice Holmes once famously dissented that it’s a form of judicial activism to base our courts on “an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain.” It seems like the same should be said for our government and our regulatory bodies, especially as they try and figure out how to fix the mess that is the financial markets. And it’s worth noting that the founder of this economic theory, The Efficient Markets Hypothesis, doesn’t even believe that people actually in the financial markets entertain it."

"Many 401(k) investors last year bailed out of stocks, often the day after big market drops, Hewitt found, with nearly 20 percent of investors switching their assets -- all getting out of stocks. This means they locked in losses, selling low after buying high during the run-up of previous years."

"The press has become journalism’s curse, not only because it now brings a crushing cost burden but also because it led to all these myths: that we journalists own the news, that we’re necessary to it, that we decide what’s reported and what’s important, that we can package the world for you every day in a box with a bow on it, that what we do is perfect (with rare, we think, exceptions), that the world should come to us to be informed, that we deserve to be paid for this service, that the world needs us."

"This paper seeks to explode the myth that Turing Machines (TM) are the universal model for all computation."

Now would somebody please undermine the computational complexity greed people have about algorithms? I find it deeply embarrassing to be told by somebody who "knows too much" that they will never even try an algorithm that is worse than polynomial, under any circumstances or for any problem. Like the idiots who have been taught some Gaussian statistics and say they would never gamble in a Casino because they KNOW they would ALWAYS lose.

"For decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for improving employee motivation and performance in organizations. Advocates of goal setting argue that for goals to be successful, they should be specific and challenging, and countless studies find that specific, challenging goals motivate performance far better than "do your best" exhortations. The authors of this article, however, argue that it is often these same characteristics of goals that cause them to "go wild.""

"This is an important insight as we look at right wing victimology --- it's based upon old fashioned notions of honor that still characterizes certain corners of southern culture, but which has been incorporated into American conservative thinking at large as it adopted these regional folkways as its tribal norms. (The book Southern Honor by Bertram Wyatt Brown explains the whole "honor" mystique in great depth and it's probably as good a guide to the victimization reflex as anything.)"

"The real lesson of this crisis is that the only infinite resource in the economy is financiers' capacity for self delusion.

So, lay off the black swans. It's not their fault. Responsibility for this crisis begins and ends with gullible bankers. And this is why we need broader regulation of the financial system: because at the end of the day, bankers (like all other humans) are greedy and gullible idiots."

"But perhaps that also explains why there has been so little public outcry about it. We love the idea of the small town, but we don't really want to live there, facing a choice between the night shift at Wal-Mart and the army. The war is being fought by people from those place we invoke as part of our national mythology but whose reality we have otherwise largely forgotten. Places we barely notice as we zip by on the bypass."