10 posts
Psychologists can measure celebrity worship on a scale, and in a representative sample only about 4.5% reach the high-intensity level. What makes Tamil Nadu distinctive isn't more intense fandom — it's that the fan clubs were organised into electoral machinery.
Foods differ enormously in measurable harm — beef emits about 113 times what peas do per unit of protein. But the diets people moralise are organised around purity and disgust, not around that ranking, and the two orderings barely overlap.
'BP invented the carbon footprint to blame you for climate change' is one of the internet's favourite facts. The individual-scale framing came from two ecologists at UBC a decade earlier, and the uncomfortable part is that it was designed that way on purpose.
Weak social connection carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking — that finding is solid across 148 studies and 300,000 people. The claim that loneliness is rising to epidemic levels has, on the actual trend data, essentially no empirical support. Both things are true at once.
Every argument that capitalism atomised us needs a premise: that community actually declined. The single most quoted piece of evidence for it — that Americans' circle of confidants shrank by a third — was argued in the same journal to be a measurement artifact, twice.
Two countries, one mechanism. When assets appreciate faster than wages, the price of joining the owning class rises faster than the means of paying for it — and the same salary buys a smaller claim on the future every year. The US and Canada fail at this in mirror-image ways.
When empirical frameworks are absent, analytical minds redirect their reasoning towards faith. This post explores how social confinement and neural reward systems make faith intellectually rich and psychologically satisfying, and how cognitive foundations and social ecology contribute to this phenomenon.
The productivity slowdown, the hollowed-out middle, and the long decline in business dynamism are each well documented. The stage theory that binds them into a single arc of civilisational decline is not — and since 2023 the three have been moving in different directions, which is exactly what a cycle is not supposed to do.
The oldest argument in human rights is whether universal standards can be applied to particular cultures. Egypt is the case where we can check. Prohibition plus medical authority did not end the practice — it relocated it, and gave it a safety justification it did not have before.
Smoke-free laws cut heart-attack admissions by about 13% across eighteen studies — nobody had to be persuaded of anything. Meanwhile a review of systematic reviews found that mass media campaigns are among the interventions with evidence of increasing inequalities between income groups, not reducing them.
