Pocket, an app that lets you save webpages to read later. I’ve found it more convenient than the alternatives. Recommended if you constantly have tabs open to read later.
Why did early innovation take so long? Once again, discovered on Marginal Revolution.
Estate/inheritance taxes are bad because they preference consumption over investment/saving. Also contains persuasive but fairly obvious arguments against libertarian support for tax loopholes.
An old SSC Post collecting interesting facts from a forensic psychiatry conference. One factoid: “During a death penalty case, jurors who don’t believe in capital punishment (and therefore would throw the case for reasons other than the defendant’s guilt or innocence) are automatically excluded from participating. But those jurors are usually more liberal, and the pro-capital-punishment jurors who get tapped are usually more conservative. Liberal jurors are usually more likely to acquit any type of criminal, and conservatives more likely to convict. Therefore, in certain cases it can be easier to get a death penalty conviction than a life in prison conviction, because you’re throwing the most merciful jurors out of the potential pool.”
An excellent review/critique of The Elephant in the Brain from Broken Vase. Excerpt: “There’s no need to be a hypocrite about being a hypocrite. People are watching you to see what will happen if they press a button and see what stock response you send. Will you pull out the slip of paper containing the appropriate answer? That’s what they are checking. They don’t care what your underlying logical algorithm is; that’s not very correlated with the slips of paper that come out when you press buttons, whereas your loyalty is highly correlated with those paper slips. If your logic says that what you write on those slips is about loyalty, but you pull out the right slips of paper, does that make you less loyal? Or more loyal? I’m not even sure”
Dissent 