Wieseltier on Scientism

Leon Wieseltier offers a great sermon against scientism. The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question. Science confers no special authority, it confers no authority at all, for the attempt to answer a nonscientific question. It is not for science to say whether …

Links: Misapplications of math, journalism, AIDS, EB White, Pricing, Gifted Students

A tremendously sad story about skewed incentives that make certain people try to get AIDS. This is a pretty outrageous misapplication of mathematics to psychology. Journalism teachers on journalism school An interesting profile of several talented students in a magnet program near DC, 20 years ago. The piece focuses on a young woman, Elizabeth Mann, …

A Suggestion for The Economist

The wonderful magazine The Economist has a two-page spread The world this week at the beginning of each issue with very short blurbs about the week’s news. I was reading the section this week when an idea came to me. In this week’s section, there’s an entry for the horrific deaths in India: At least …

Links: NSA, New Nobels, Marijuana Legalization, Corporations and the First Amendment, Roger Ebert, etc

A good article in Slate’s Explainer column on what the legal repercussions would be for congressmen who revealed NSA secrets. An interesting article by Graeme Wood in New York magazine about online reputation management. Gene Weingarten, A story that could make Roger Ebert look bad. Too soon? Often Weingarten is a bit (or, well, more …

Interesting Articles, Links, Etc.

Some more links. Why do companies buy out startups just to get their employees, rather than just offering them higher salaries, which seems like it would be cheaper? An interesting article in the NYT gives some answers to this puzzle about so-called acqui-hiring in Silicon Valley.1 See also the longer law article by the original …

Interesting Links

I imagine in the blog that I will be sharing various links to articles, etc., that I find interesting. Perhaps lightly annotated. Rather than overburden your RSS feed or whatnot with too many individual entries (cough, cough Andrew Sullivan, who I would subscribe to if there would be some way to do so without it …