Enfascination is the transmission of wonder. Nescience is knowing nothing. The goal of this blog is to connect the mundane daily practice of science with the experiences of wonder and humility that make it worth doing.
Freshness date: March 25, 2025.
When policies are written by humans: The challenge of computational law
What if governance technologies are the last thing we need?
"We don't want any leader who wants to lead": King sacrifice and a mechanism for finding reluctant leaders
The project of developing leaders when freedom is an endless meeting
Psychohistory –70,000 years later: How Asimov was right and wrong about social prediction
What you know when you know nothing: some toys in quantitative epistemology
Adaptive governance: tuning for emergent politics
Video: Online communities as model systems for commons governance
Why save democracy when you can save dictatorship? Incentive compatible survey design
My talk at the AI Objectives Institute: "The Commons Approach to Online Self-Governance"
I found the place in Chico where the world was created
Why should all languages be preserved? The problem is the question
Why decentralization is always ripe for co-optation
Psychoactives in governance | The double-blind policy process
Community building as one of your basic skills
The unpopular hypothesis of democratic technology. What if all governance is onboarding?
AI in the classroom
Timezones and mindstates
Cut it out with this Gordian knot stuff
The toilet humor
Beyond first-order skepticism
How is a pager different from a doorbell?
Understanding Taylor Swift with Python
Your face's facets
Definitions that rhyme
"Why can't I work with this person?": Your collaborator's secret manual
Simple heuristic for breaking pills in half
All the SATOR squares in English, with code
What's the thing in your life that you've looked at more than anything else?
How to order a coffee in the minefield of preexisting categories
The crises of a quantitative social scientist
Calvino excerpt: the wisdoms of knowing and not knowing
Almost-puns: the highest art
Visualizing the 4th dimension in 1936 (Jean Painlevé documentary — 10 min)
Critiques of the Ostrom scholarship
The simplest demo that big data breaks p-value stats
Cancel culture and free speech are compatible, in 3 pages.
The mind-expanding Internet; the like-minder finder
The Future: Michio Kaku's accurate 2020 from 1997
Changing how you think is like changing your nutrition in a way
More on the lasting impact of cybernetics on society
The sorry state of my optimism about humanity's distant future
Our world is strange enough for these tops and dice to be
New paper out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Low profile search for the cheapest, shortest domain on the Internet
Now hiring graduate students and postdocs at UC Davis
How to win against Donald Trump in court
Toothbrushes are up to 95% less effective after 3 months and hugging your children regularly can raise their risk of anxiety, alcoholism, or depression by up to 95%
A secure Bitcoin is a manipulable Bitcoin by definition
The decentralization fetishists and the democracy fetishists
Good ol' Popper
Subjective utility paradox in a classic gift economy cycle with loss aversion
Metaphors are bad for science, except when they transform it
New work using a video game to explain how human cultural differences emerge
Small-scale democracy: How to head a headless organization
In case there's doubt that Charles Bukowski's Post Office is about himself
Why Carl Sagan wasn't an astronaut
Bringing big data to the science of community: Minecraft Edition
H. G. Wells on science and humility
A recent history of astrology
New work on positive and negative social influence in social media: how your words come back to haunt you
Instagram Demo: Your friends are more popular than you
Change your baby's astrological sign with physics!
"It was found that pairing abstract art pieces with randomly generated pseudoprofound titles enhanced the perception of profoundness"
New in Journal of Computational Social Science: "Cognitive mechanisms for human flocking dynamics"
Appearance on two podcasts with Steaming Piles of Science
Book: The Common Sense of Science (1978) by Jacob Bronowski
A strong identity is no defense against hypocrisy (a good offense is a bad defense)
Do you lose things? Here's the magical way to find them.
Tom Lehrer song ripping on quantitative social science
Philip K. Dick's vanity was his best protection from his vanity
Hey look, Andrew Gelman didn't rip me a new one!
1920's infoviz, when "Flapperism" was the culmination of Western civilization
in Cognitive Science: Synergistic Information Processing Encrypts Strategic Reasoning in Poker
Words with doubles give me troubles
Satie's doodles
Waiting in the cold: the cognitive upper limits on the formation of spontaneous order.
Many have tried, none have succeeded: "Pavlov's cat" isn't funny.
Ramon y Cajal's Advice to a young investigator
My most sticky line from Stephenson's Diamond Age
Generous and terrifying: the best late homework policy of all time
How to create a Google For Puppies homepage
Quantifying the relative influence of prejudices in scientific bias, for Ioannidis
Pandas in 2018
Good mental hygiene demands constant vigilance, meta-vigilance, and meta-meta-vigilance
List of Google Scholar advanced search operators
typographically heavy handed web design
A simple way to drive to get more efficiency out of cruise control
How do we practice large-scale social engineering when, historically, most of it is evil?
"What's a pee-dant?"
My great grandma's face tattoos
New paper out from my time at Disney: Blind moderation with human computation
Modern economic ideology has overwritten sharing as the basis of human history
A house in a part of the Netherlands that's in a part of Belgium in the Netherlands.
Black and white emoji fonts
all the emoji in a line
Yeah, I'm not sure that that's the takeaway
Behavioral economics in the smallest nutshell
Searle has good ideas and original ideas, but his good ones aren't original, and his original ones aren't good.
White hat p-hacking, a primer
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More posts, going further back
Ground rules
Blogging helps me write, and writing and rewriting help me think, so articles will change without warning as I rework them. I don’t publish your comments, but I do read them. Opinions are my own.