Author Archives: Meredith L. Patterson

There’s a pattern most observers of human interaction have noticed, common enough to have earned its own aphorism: “nice guys finish last.” Or, refactored, “bad actors are unusually good at winning.” The phenomenon shows up in business, in politics, in … Continue reading →

How big is your filter bubble? What’s in it? What’s outside it? Okay, next question: how can you tell? In 2011, Eli Pariser defined a filter bubble as “that personal ecosystem of information that’s been catered by algorithms.” Unfortunately, he never defined a … Continue reading →

Update: Pieter chose euthanasia around 1pm Belgian time, October 4th, 2016. Everything else in this post is still accurate. Pieter Hintjens will most likely be dead before terribly much longer. Cancer, bile duct, metastatic. He is not exactly shy about any … Continue reading →

This is my favorite joke of all time. Transcript of a US naval ship with Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland: Americans: “Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.” Canadians: “Recommend you divert … Continue reading →

Polus. And is that not a great power? Socrates. Polus has already said the reverse. If you’ve ever taken a course that touched on the Platonic dialogues — intro philosophy, intro classics, even some rhetoric courses still — you’ve probably heard them described as … Continue reading →

The internet has been abuzz over the last few days about a preprint in PeerJ Preprints, “Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women vs. men.” Scott Alexander delivers a summary of popular-media responses to this, among other … Continue reading →