15 posts
If science keeps changing its mind, is any of it authoritative? The honest answer requires noticing that revisions have sizes. Going from a flat Earth to a sphere corrects 8 inches per mile; going from sphere to oblate spheroid corrects three hundredths of an inch.
Legibility asymmetry describes the bias where existing systems are unfairly judged against untested alternatives. This occurs because only established things have visible failures, while challengers remain unscrutinized by reality at scale.
India did not uniformly regress after 2014. It expanded basic access and sustained growth, but productive jobs, manufacturing, learning, distribution, and democratic correction did not keep pace with its development opportunity.
Industry is excellent at research with a measurable operational payoff. The harder gap appears when effects are delayed, cumulative, distributed across society, and difficult for any one firm to own.
Registered atrocity cases against Dalits rose sharply in Tamil Nadu between 2019 and 2023. The number matters—but it cannot, by itself, tell us whether violence, reporting, registration, or all three changed.
The usual story about the pension shift is that coverage collapsed. It didn't. Participation hit its highest level since 2010 and increased across the whole income distribution — while the mean balance for the bottom half of earners fell, during a stock market boom.
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.
India's small farms need sophisticated testing, chilling, packing, transport, and market access. They do not all need to become large farms. The better development question is which functions require scale—and who should own them.
Both figures are published, peer-reviewed, and about the United States. They differ by an order of magnitude because they answer different questions — and the study that produced the smaller number also found where the money actually goes.
Calling rabies preventable can hide the work prevention requires: vaccinated dogs, immediate wound care, stocked clinics, correct treatment, repeat visits, and surveillance that joins them together.
An AI system need not fear death or possess a survival instinct to resist interruption. If staying active helps it achieve an objective, persistence can emerge as strategy rather than feeling.
High-throughput clinics can make routine care affordable. They fail when every patient is treated as a routine episode—even when diagnosis requires time, continuity, and someone who owns the whole case.
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.
Every ideology presents itself as the thing holding society together. Across 475 elections in 62 countries, what actually predicts whether a government survives is material performance — largely regardless of its ideology. But the reverse claim, that delivering goods buys you loyalty, turns out to be false too.
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.
