More evidence that economics (and psychology) are becoming sciences, not just ideologies.
This year’s Nobel Prizes in economics are interesting, Paul Krugman explains, because their recipients applied real-world evidence which turn out to undermine ideological economic theories that that have intuitive appeal for certain mindsets.
Robert Sheckley was a science fiction writer who debuted in the early 1950s, right about the time that Philip K. Dick did. They were both prolific short story writers through the ’50s, each publishing several stories a year, in the various magazines of the time.
Yesterday we took a three-hour drive, with a lunch stop part-way through, but since I didn’t take any photos along the way, it didn’t happen, by some internet standards.
Links from this past week, with comments, about how Facebook finds disinformation popular and therefore profitable, how its users search out disinformation to confirm their preconceptions, how Republican disinfo about COVID is killing off its base, about Trump True Believers’ authoritarian reasons, and about the complexity of modern life.
[Image from Salon.]
I am going to begin posting relatively *brief* comments about books I’ve read lately, to keep up with what I’ve been reading. My extensive book summaries with comments take a long time to set up; by waiting to post anything about a book I’ve read until such a complete post is ready is a kind of “perfect is the enemy of good”. I can do shorter posts and keep up, and these shorter posts might actually be more useful to readers, than my lengthy summaries and comments have been.
But already I’m writing too much. Today’s post is about Philip K. Dick’s THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, published in 1962, winner of the Hugo Award, and a few years ago basis for a TV series… which I had not seen. I reread the novel a couple weeks ago.
Here are several links about religion I’ve captured in recent weeks mostly to the Patheos.com website, which is a collection of blogs from all points of view along the religious spectrum. The ones I tend to read, of course, are those devoted to pointing out the latest religious hypocrisies, especially among politicians, and those by people who once believed and left the church, and are happy to explain why, often in great detail. (They are the smart ones who have figured it out, as I keep saying.) Precisely the sites that believers will ignore. As they will ignore this post.
What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Star Trek TOS, and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series have in common?
Catching up on one last batch of links and comments collected but not yet posted since I came home from the hospital in June. Not all of them political.
And, let’s try something new: placing some kind of relevant photograph above the “more” fold, so the front page of this site looks more interesting than dry blocks of text. — In fact, I’m going to go back and edit several recent posts to add photos. Just a few for now. (For most of these, I am shamelessly linking to the photographs embedded in the linked articles. The one right here is an exception.)
From early August through early September — back at the beginning of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, when Covid deaths in the US hadn’t yet reached 700,000.
Ls&Cs: Problem-Solving, Ethics, Out-Group Prejudice, and Padding Bestseller Lists
Several links that I collected on April 20th, the day I went to the hospital for what led to my heart transplant.
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