We all know that the vast majority of the interweb is just garbage and the swamp continues to grow at an amazing speed.
In fact the swamp animals work hard to get rid of the valuable stuff ...
But there is still the one percent of high quality and recently I found another piece of it:
The lectures of Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky on the biology of human behavior.
I am surprised that we are still allowed to see it ...
10 comments:
Have you read his book, Behave? I recommend it.
Thank you for the recommendation - I will ...
Btw there are other great lectures on YouTube, but I assume that readers of this blog are already aware of Lenny Susskind and physics.
I've read a couple of his books but haven't looked into the online lectures. I guess I should.
I read "Behave" and "Monkeyluv" by Sapolsky. I thought "Behave" was the better of the two. I like Susskind's lectures because he's clear enough that I can usually follow them. I kind of doubt that his "Theoretical Minimum" series of lectures is exactly what Landau had in mind though. :-)
The loss of SlateStarCodex is a blow!
@Lee I think the NYT has lost it ...
Wolfgang,
I saw that yesterday or the day before. But to be honest I don't read the NYT editorial page so am not really familiar with her or any of their other writers. My guess is Scott Aaronson's latest post is probably applicable to what is going on there. It's my belief that liberal democracy isn't really consistent with our evolutionary psychology and is consequently fragile and not easily sustained. I could easily be wrong about that. In my case old age didn't bring any wisdom, just brain rot. Timothy Ferris wrote a book about ten years ago called "The Science of Liberty" that I thought was quite good and addresses a lot of these issues that concern me and I imagine you too.
I think every form of government is fragile and can change quickly if circumstances change,
but I would have thought that US democracy is quite robust, after all it survived a civil war and the great depression.
It would be quite tragic/comic if social media (and the reaction of the 'serious' media to the existential threat from social media) does it ...
If I were guessing what the biggest threat to liberal democracy in the United States is, I would guess that it in effect simply gets voted out of existence. It seems that social media will play a big role in whatever happens.
Post a Comment