The Itch of Curiosity. I assume that curiosity and intelligence are correlated. If you’re curious about math and science as a child, and are not very good at mathematics and formal thinking (I had a friend like this) you get discouraged, and move onto other domains where you have strengths. But, there are very intelligent people who lack curiosity. So I’m curious, so to speak, about the r-squared here, and the residual. We know that intelligence and low time preference are correlated, but I’m almost more interested in the deviation from the trend line, those who are intelligent and have high time preference, and those who lack intelligence and have low time preference.
The New Science of Morality. Jonathan Haidt is promoting his theory of different moral foundations. It is no surprise that I think that the reduction of moral choices and preferences to reason makes about as much empirical sense as the reduction of religion to theology. The emergence of experimental philosophy indicates that the pendulum is finally swinging back from an overemphasis on thin reflection, and back to thick intuition, in terms of how we understand even “higher” aspects of human nature. But when it comes to conversations which do put the onus on reason, those who are low on empathy can be bracing and fruitful as interlocutors. People such as Robin Hanson and those who read Less Wrong.
You are what you eat – how your diet defines you in trillions of ways. A microbiologist I knew always loved to recount the fact that there were an order of magnitude more bacterial cells within your body than conventional tissue cells! There is an interesting contrast with the reality of how we humans perceive ourselves. In ecology we seem integrated with our domesticates, while bodily we are inseparable from our gut flora.
Why prediction is a risky business. We’ll probably have a “$1,000 genome” within two years, but what will we do with the sequence once we get it?
How Puritans became capitalists. My reading of American history suggests that New England in many ways was sui generis when it came to the British settler colonies. The American South, Oceania, Canada, to some extent even the Mid-Atlantic, developed a predominant relationship whereby useful commodities were exported to the metropole for further processing, and then imported back as finished goods. By contrast New England was poor as source of raw materials which would be useful to Britain, and so initially engaged in arbitrage, and later light industry. Over time this led it to becoming something of a secondary center of cultural and economic development to England itself. The shift of allegiance of much of the lower North from the Southern-led political coalition of the early 19th century (which favored free trade and low tariffs) to one with the Yankee Empire which spanned New England to the Upper Midwest by the late 19th century (which favored internal development and high tariffs) solidified the distinctive economic trajectory of the United States as a separate locus of industrial power.
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