See discussion of this essay on the forum, Hacker News (a), Marginal Revolution (a), Andrew Gelman’s blog 1 (a), 2 (a), 3 (a), 4 (a), /r/slatestarcodex (a), Twitter (a), listen to BBC interviewing me and Walker himself about it or listen to my interview with Smart People Podcast discussing it. Note: I link to a bunch of paywalled studies in this essay. Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. For the clearest …

Truly unlocking competition in tech means increasing interoperability; an absolutist approach to privacy is doing the exact opposite.

Explore our surprisingly simple, absurdly ambitious and necessarily incomplete guide to the boundless mathematical universe.

(Cross-posted at NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.) Remember when, inspired by Sam Harris’s TED talk, we debated whether you could derive “ought” (morality) from “is&#82…

The successful development of mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 is ‘transformational’ and opens the doors to new types of vaccines for other infectious diseases as well as cancer, according to Dr Özlem Türeci and Dr Uğur Şahin, the co-founders of Germany’s BioNTech.

Violet Gibson from Dublin never made it into the history books. But she did come very close to changing the course of 20th-century Europe. She shot Benito Mussolini in 1926. Nearly a century later, the Irish capital is going to honor her.

Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist turned computer scientist, has a new project: charting his every bodily function in minute detail. What he’s discovering may be the future of health care.

The story of a few good men's struggle, against their own commanders, their own fleet, their own ships and their own men.Want to support the channel? - https...