Gongol.com Archives: January 2019

Brian Gongol


January 3, 2019

Socialism Doesn't Work China's "social credit" system will permit the government to grade everyone

They say it's because people need to trust one another. And it is absolutely true that a society needs mutual trust among its people in order to function. It is absolutely false to think that government can evaluate, measure, score, or impose that trust from above. If the trust doesn't emerge organically, it doesn't really exist.

News Game theory and the Oval Office

The President frames everything like a Manhattan real-estate transaction (two parties, one round). In reality, the world is vastly more complex than that -- most importantly, almost nothing is excluded to two parties, and almost every interaction is part of a long chain of events (and people have memories). Deep down, it's less an ideological problem and more a game-theory problem.

Computers and the Internet Barbarians at the tweet

When people turn to social media to shout their lack of interest in other people through a megaphone, it whacks civilization in the kneecaps.

News On the European Union, the United Kingdom isn't so unified

Scotland voted 62% to remain in the EU. Northern Ireland voted 55.8% to remain. Such a strange consequence of history that they're being dragged out of the EU effectively against their national wills.

Threats and Hazards Evidence mounts that China's campaign against the Uighurs is as bad as can be imagined

If a state puts all of the writers, artists, and intellectuals of a minority group in prison, you can be sure they are seeking to grind their culture right out of existence. This is a much, much bigger deal than whether the US sold China a few million more or fewer iPhones. How China's government not only aggregates but executes its power is massively important.

News How long is the perfect book?

Substantially shorter than the average non-fiction book of the present day, that's for sure. But it turns out that data about our reading (and reviewing) habits now collected via the Internet gives some useful feedback on the relationship between length and quality. Or, at least, it suggests that people tend to over-rate long books...probably to make ourselves feel better about finishing books with too many pages.


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