Links

A small collection of what I've found interesting on the web.

Scattered essays:

• What Makes People Vote Republican? (Jonathan Haidt). It's not an argument for voting Republican, but rather an honest attempt to understand the conservative moral worldview.Eye-opening.
• Book of Lamentations (Sam Kriss). This piece works in a different register. It's satire, but also beautiful, in its way, and haunting: a review of the DSM-5 as a piece of dystopian fiction.
• The Intelligent Plant (Michael Pollan). At a different time scale, plants behave a lot like animals.

Academic papers:

• The WEIRDest people in the world
• Why do humans reason?
• Signalling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior. A rollicking (if dense) survey of the anthropology of religion. It's worth reading even if you aren't fascinated by religion because it explains a lot of tribal behavior (both religious and secular).

Videos

• Timelapse of a 450-ton transformer moving around the world. Logistics is beautiful.
• Timelapse video of Pyongyang, North Korea. Not your traditional view of NK.

Misc:

• Chess fog-of-war simulation in a high school classroom
• The Machine Stops. A short story about the Internet, published in 1909(!). Downright chilling.

Paul Graham classics:

• What You Can't Say
• Keep Your Identity Small
• The Age of the Essay

Ribbonfarm favorites:

• Ribbonfarm itself, a source of many new ideas and concepts, and a big inspiration for Melting Asphalt.
• A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
• Eternal Hypochondria of the Expanding Mind. "To understand any chapter in the story of humanity, it is not enough to ask, what is the plot? and what were the archetypes of the day? We must also ask, what were they smoking?"
• Patterns of Refactored Agency (guest blogger Mike Travers)
• The Government Within (guest blogger Mike Travers). "The 'self' is like a prime minister — not powerful in its own right, but because it has become the public face of the most powerful faction."

Scott Alexander favorites:

• The Consequentialism FAQ. "All other moral systems are subtly but distinctly insane." [Update 2017/11/21: Original link expired; now linking to Internet Archive.]