Epistemic status: hand waving but confidant. I was thinking about reflective reasoning and "strange loops through the meta level" and it led me to this intuition that even if you have to make some assumptions to support your beliefs, if your beliefs can be justified by various different sets o...

Alex Tabarok suggests improving crowdfunding by letting fundraisers offer a bonus as compensation for anyone that gets a refund if the project fails. By doing that the fundraiser solves the coordination problem making non-funding the equilibrium: if I think that you won’t contribute then I m...

From 1865 to 1909, Belgium was ruled by a great king. He helped promote the adoption of universal male suffrage and proportional-representation voting. During his rule Belgium rapidly industrialized and had immense economic growth. He gave workers the right to strike. He passed laws protecting women...

Epistemic status: fairly confident. I'm not a cryptographer, but no one raised strong objections and I thought about it a bunch since first thinking about it. Everyone talking about password peppering is missing a better method to implement it1.  Whether you think peppers are good or bad,...

Should YouTube's algorithm recommend conspiracy theory videos? Should twitter recommend tweets that disagree with the WHO? Should Facebook recommend things that'll make you angry? There's countless such questions about recommender algorithms, usually with good arguments on both sides. But the el...