HWFO Reading List September 2023
And two book reviews so you don't have to read the book
A friend of mine made the finals of the annual “ACX Book Review Contest” with this review of a book about how to understand risk in general, and with nuclear power in particular. It is not a “ZOMG regulators are out of hand!” book, but rather a nuanced look at the history of nuclear regulation itself.
The second book review this month is by another friend, Cactus Chu, with whom a recorded a marathon four hour podcast last year. He reviews the cultural lightning rod Richard Hanania’s new book about the Origins of Woke.
Hanania’s take on Woke is divergent from HWFO and some other publications, which have sought to establish a philosophical framework for it. Hanania views it as a dogma pieced together from little bits of law and politics without any internal consistency by design.
HWFO Slack has been discussing dating, after my two articles a month and change ago.
More Dating Math:
https://twitter.com/sebjenseb/status/1697685875432493070
The Fifth Circuit holds that government meddling in social media censorship in 2020 was a first amendment violation.
Consequentialism naturally leads to support for family punishment:
Swedish gangs discover a novel way to launder money and also boost the streaming revenue streams of affiliated gangster rappers:
Reading when you’re younger changes how your brain develops:
Grey Zone gives us a point by point of the RICO indictment of the Stop Cop City protesters:
https://twitter.com/grayzoneintel/status/1699417662026060242
The Atlantic’s semi-hit-piece on Lara Logan got a lot of traffic and is worth reading in my opinion. What I find curious about it is they open with lumping a lot of stuff that’s obviously conspiracy theory in with some things which probably aren’t, and some things which require nuance, in their depiction of Lara’s current views. I also find it rather tone deaf because it doesn’t want to acknowledge that Lara fell into her current rabbit hole in part because of the things the left wing media did, particularly to her. I was going to write something big about this, but as I built the outline I realized it was going to get mired in my own “admittedly difficult to substantiate” opinions about what happened in Benghazi, and decided the whole thing wouldn’t flow well.
This article in the Free Press got a lot of traffic because it exposed the sorts of things that scientists have to do in order to get published, as far as narrative control and mitigation that HWFO went over a few weeks ago in Talkin About Tonga.
Nature had a stiff rebuttal, and some others have accused the author of grandstanding on his way out of academia.
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-scientist-left-full-truth-climate.html
In “Don’t Build The Torment Nexus” news:
https://www.businessinsider.com/developer-creates-ai-disinformation-system-using-openai-2023-9
And in case you don’t get the torment nexus joke…
Clickbait of the Month entry #1:
Clickbait of the Month entry #2:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/trans-muslim-woman-demands-ex-lover-return-amputated/
For the subtle title narrative twist of the month: (professors are actually blaming the lockdowns, but who’s counting)
https://apnews.com/article/college-math-test-help-6cca6a5e873d5aeb5e75b4f94125d48c
This was a really, really enjoyable read about something incredibly inconsequential, but I can’t recommend it enough. Herein, someone decides to try and find out why a pedestrian bridge was built from nowhere to nowhere.
https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge
The murder rate continues to fall:
Close friend of the publication and occasional discussion leader on HWFO Slack Peter Limberg postulates that the culture wars have turned into a war of sources:
Benjamin Franklin once trolled the Royal Academy with a very complicated fart joke.
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/to-the-royal-academy-of-farting/
I deeply believe that declining fertility rates are going to be the big story, both environmentally and economically, in the 21st century, and emerging science indicates that around 85% of that is linked directly to the spread of feminism.
https://www.cfr.org/event/emptying-planet-global-impact-declining-fertility-rates-virtual-roundtable
Complexity Theory is really hard, and this article does an ok job of explaining why.
Scott’s Bay Area House Party joke posts are some of the funniest things he writes.
The desire to have your genes tested is (?) genetic.
If you want to stay on top of these and other breaking stories, and discuss them with others, consider joining the HWFO Slack community by subscribing.
I feel for Lara Logan. This 2014 hit-piece on her by NY Magazine was gutter journalism at its finest. It even called the brutal gang rape she suffered while covering the 2011 Arab Spring in Egypt, a 'groping'!
There are two wolves inside of me.
No wonder I'm so godsdamned fat...