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This week's post is about Hume's "is-ought problem". I argue that this "problem" is largely illusory; all arguments need premises, you can always challenge premises, but there's nothing special about "is" and "ought" here. patrickjuli.us/2025/01/05/w...

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

I don't think people appreciate that the US military is extraordinarily good at destroying a nation's productive capacity but also extraordinarily bad at running a successful occupation. In fact, we've lost the last several wars where we had to do that.

submitted 47 days ago • 1 comment

Given this news, it would be good to see academics and academic institutions cut ties with meta. It is now abundantly clear they are using laundering academic research to justify decisions made for purely practical and financial reasons. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01...

submitted 47 days ago • 5 comments

In this week's post, I reflect on land acknowledgments, and the history of violence they are meant to acknowledge: patrickjuli.us/2024/12/29/o...

submitted 55 days ago • 1 comment

In this week's post I continue my takedown of religious morality, showing how mainstream religious institutions have been implicated in some of the worst crimes imaginable and religious ideas have held back moral progress for centuries. patrickjuli.us/2024/12/16/m...

submitted 69 days ago • 0 comments

In my latest post I continue my takedown of religious morality, this time with a focus on holy texts: Even if God were real, we couldn't trust the books. patrickjuli.us/2024/12/09/m...

submitted 76 days ago • 0 comments

Also, here’s a friendly reminder of how much a billion dollars is. If you made $20/hour and worked 40 hours per week (52 weeks per year): It would take you 25 years to earn $1 million. But it would take you 24,039 years to earn $1 billion.

submitted 78 days ago • 5 comments

Back on Twitter, there was an awesome account called “… in mice.” Every time someone tweeted out a mouse-based study like it was a human-based one (“Cheez-Its cause lung cancer!”) it’d RT w just “in mice” to highlight the extrapolation concerns. Need that for “… in an artificial survey” too.

submitted 78 days ago • 5 comments

Trump's margin of victory—in a country of 342 million—is down to 2.2 million and 1.47%. His vote share is <50%. Republicans for now have only a 1-vote majority in the House. Things are so bad for Trump in the Senate that he's floating illegally dismissing the entire body. This is his "mandate."

submitted 78 days ago • 76 comments

In this week's post I tear down one of the most critical foundations of religious belief: The afterlife. It's time to stop being politely "agnostic" about this; the nonexistence of an afterlife is a scientific fact. patrickjuli.us/2024/12/01/t...

submitted 83 days ago • 1 comment

In this week's blog post I continue my series on religion, with a simple but highly controversial claim: Religion is false. patrickjuli.us/2024/11/24/r...

submitted 90 days ago • 0 comments

they’ve managed a neat trick where, by being so obviously impossible to reach or change in any way, they’ve escaped all need to do so the people who write these thinkpieces blaming progressives for not reaching out know that everyone would laugh at them for suggesting the same of MAGA

submitted 91 days ago • 16 comments

I wrote about some particularly egregious cases of high-profile liberal and – nominally, at least – anti-MAGA elites opting to fall in line: Leading Democratic politicians, the ostensibly liberal legal establishment, news media stars… Not a lot of appetite for resistance to be found among them.

submitted 91 days ago • 4 comments

ive been thinking how the right is never asked to extend the olive branch to the left -- if the left wins elections, they should be inclusive and reach out. If the left loses elections, they should be inclusive and reach out. at no point is it ever possible that the right will reach out to the left.

submitted 91 days ago • 13 comments

What a strange headline for a story that notes: 1. 2,169 ballots were rejected for no ID. 2. "The voter ID law disproportionately hindered Democrats." 3. "The evidence overwhelmingly shows" that fraud "is essentially nonexistent." 4. The state Supreme Court race was decided by only 625 votes.

submitted 91 days ago • 310 comments

submitted 95 days ago • 4 comments

“In 2022, YouGov asked “What percentage of Americans do you think are ___?” The results were hilarious. Trans: 21% Muslim: 27% Jewish: 30% Black: 41% Live in NYC: 30% Gay or lesbian: 30% The errors are off by orders of magnitude. The trans estimation by 2,000%.” www.thebulwark.com/p/americans-...

submitted 92 days ago • 233 comments

Maybe something for #EconSky

submitted 91 days ago • 0 comments

I think a lot of the folks remaining on X think that you need MAGA faithful in the mix or else it's an echo chamber. I have no problem being in a place where people hate my politics but agree that Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy.

submitted 91 days ago • 113 comments

This dialogue is full of great stuff, but this quote in particular really stuck with me: "In other words, just because you disagree with every tenet of these people’s faith doesn’t mean that they don’t sincerely think of themselves as servants of the Lord."

submitted 93 days ago • 1 comment

"I want us to think about what that 'counterzeal' looks like in practice." A difficult + amazing conversation ⭐️ also: I am a truthout monthly donor at $11/mo because independent journalism has never been as important as it is now! can you match me? or make a one-time donation at truthout.org?

submitted 93 days ago • 1 comment

"we have a cache of secret documents about pedophiles in government that we will only release if you force us, it's not like we wanna make this public" is certainly a threat about someone's credibility, but i don't think they understand whose

submitted 93 days ago • 5 comments

submitted 94 days ago • 821 comments

If you’re willing to fuck your union and your own paycheck over trans people being able to use the bathroom I don’t really know what to say www.inquirer.com/politics/ele...

submitted 93 days ago • 161 comments

In Friday's #econjmp, Peter Deffebach(BU) looks at the puzzle of why exits from wage jobs are so high in developing countries. Using panel surveys, he finds quit rates are much higher in Ghana than the U.S., & are driven by both self-employment & family transfers blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

submitted 94 days ago • 0 comments

Great. I really needed something else to be horrified about.

submitted 94 days ago • 0 comments

The myth of "US conservative censorship" on social media has always been a bit of a puzzle to those of us who track and study content moderation as a global phenomenon. But it has proved frustratingly, and quizzically, persistent and now will be embedded in US policy for the next 4 years.

submitted 94 days ago • 10 comments

SNAP work requirements fail to increase employment. Just plain getting on SNAP does improve labor market outcomes. www.hamiltonproject.org/publication/... #EconSky

submitted 97 days ago • 33 comments

it just feels like the entire political press right now is all “guess we’ll have to wait and see if raising taxes 200% and ripping 10M people from society while nominating slimer and jenny mccarthy to cabinet positions will work out”

submitted 95 days ago • 48 comments

I’d have believed that populist leaders offer a tradeoff: they’ll efficiently break rules for you, but they take a large commission (in graft and nepotism). Turns out the rule breaking isn’t even helpful. So it’s a lose-lose.

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

It should be emphasized just how obscene the Gaetz nom is. He's unqualified, unfit, & was recently investigated for sex trafficking. He faces accusations of paying for sex & sexual misconduct w/ a minor. That there's even a chance he gets confirmed as the top law enforcement official is shameful.

submitted 95 days ago • 622 comments

Teacher here. Kids who use AI are settling and not noticing the massive volume of mistakes these technologies make. It’s like cranking up the careless mistakes knob to infinity.

submitted 95 days ago • 1 comment

If this bill passes, only patent trolls will PREVAIL.

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

In this week's blog post, I challenge the common notion that religion is a good source of morality: patrickjuli.us/2024/11/17/r...

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

The really striking thing to me about AI is how far we've gotten by basically brute force. We have still learned next to nothing about how consciousness actually works, but we can mimic its output convincingly by throwing ludicrously huge matrices at things.

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments