- The Center for Effective Altruism reports on outcomes from their 10+ meetings with UK policymakers so far.
- Pinker on Ivy League education (very good).
- A profile of Martine Rothblatt: “Futurist, pharma tycoon, satellite entrepreneur, philosopher. Martine Rothblatt, the highest-paid female executive in America, was born male. But that is far from the thing that defines her. Just ask her wife. Then ask the robot version of her wife.”
- Okay, good, so I won’t read the new Fukuyama books.
I don’t think I’ve read any Fukuyama, and have no plans to do so, but I’ve found John Gray to be pretty unreliable and wouldn’t decide against reading something based on Gray’s review.
Yeah, I don’t know anything about John Gray, but I think in this case the information I used to decide not to read the books isn’t particularly stuff I’d expect somebody to be wrong/dishonest/unfair about, like how data-driven the book isn’t (compared to, say, any book by Charles Murray) and what the major conclusions are.
I find John Gray interesting in the way I find all ex Libertarians or Austrian economists interesting…they never explain (as far as I have looked and I really looked) why they stopped being libertarians or Austrians in a logical way. Yet they seem to end up at a bit of a loose end. John Gray just seems to be permanently grumpy and I think he is as much guilty as Fukuyama ecxcept the other way around…alwaya looking for what can go wrong never seeming to ackowledge the Pinker view or the facts Pinker shares in Better Angels of our Nature about how much better off humanity is despite enormous numbers etc.
It is always striking to me (a closet libertarian) how the evolutionary establishment, Dawkins et al are so left wing when surely they of all people must recognise the bottom up emergence of order libertarians bang on about.