Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In his well-known essay On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt defines bullshit as speech that is designed to impress but lacks a direct concern for the truth. Under such a definition, a large portion of what we read online today is likely to be bullshit. Some types of bullshit are political in nature, such as the misleading…
If you’re a black Airbnb user that’s had a sneaking suspicion hosts are giving you the run-around when you try to book a rental, you might be on to something. A working paper (pdf) from three Harvard Business School researchers suggests that users with black names have more trouble booking rentals. While the company doesn’t…
Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody. The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiast’s equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and…
Photo Hillary Clinton addressed guests at the Saban Forum held by the Brookings Institution in Washington on Sunday. Credit Mark Wilson/Getty Images WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton said on Sunday that the Islamic State had become “the most effective recruiter in the world” and that the only solution was to engage American technology companies in blocking…
When Mark Zuckerberg announced he would give away 99% of his Facebook shares — currently worth around $45 billion — the initial impulse from many was to assume the money would all go to charity. Indeed, very many news organizations described the donation as either going to charity, or a charitable trust. Not so, a…
In a savvy PR maneuver, today Mark Zuckerberg used the birth of his daughter Max to advertise to the world the fact that he’s decided to give away 99% of his Facebook shares (roughly $45 billion today) to charity (over the course of the rest of his life, not all at once). It sounds angelic,…
Nick Bostrom, a philosopher focussed on A.I. risks, says, “The very long-term future of humanity may be relatively easy to predict.” Credit Illustration by Todd St. John Barrier Status: ‘none’ I. Omens Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who…
Last month, at long last, we enjoyed Back to the Future Day — the day to which Marty McFly travels in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II. It’s a kind of death sentence for our era: we’re all living in the future now; the time in which things might have changed has passed, and all…
Open Source By ROBERT MACKEY Usually, by the time the public learns the names and biographies of Islamic State militants, or radicals from other groups who attack civilians, they are already dead, and so unable to speak for themselves, except occasionally in the ritualized form of martyrdom videos or manifestoes posted online. This week, however,…
There’s a predictable social media formula for what women’s pictures online should look like. Breasts in barely-there bikinis are good (thumbs-up emoji, even), but breasts with babies attached them are questionable. Women wearing next to nothing is commonplace, but if you’re over a size 10 your account may be banned. Close-up shots of women’s asses…