I have way too many Chrome bookmarks. 555 of them, in fact, many of them not actionable. Time for a purge. I'll write down how many are left at the end of the day...
Interesting US legal commentary from Gorsuch's dissent in the case of Toth having millions of dollars confiscating by the IRS over a reporting violation: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-177_d0fi.pdf. Can the US government dodge the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "excessive fines" by simply framing enormous fines as "civil penalties" instead? Gorsuch says no, this is silly. The rest of the Supreme Court says meh, this doesn't sound important enough for us to hear the case.
A less interesting half hour of my time was spent reading this takedown of the work of Lisa Cook, some woke black academic I know nothing about, and the two other related blog posts: https://www.takimag.com/article/half-cooked-data/. It's thorough and reinforces my sense that Steve Sailer is a competent and broadly trustworthy intellectual, but neither the issue at stake nor the personalities involved were of any interest to me. (I didn't bother reading the original paper being critiqued.)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-022-09615-9, on algorithmic fairness, is in part a useful elucidation and formalization of important concepts that much of the world seems to be confused about and in part tedious due to its obviousness.
Interesting stats if accurate at https://twitter.com/KevinBardosh/status/1599866819988578304: vaccinating males aged 18-29 with Covid vaccines apparently causes more hospitalizations due to myocarditis than the number of Covid-related hospitalizations it prevents. I don't trust any analyses on this, though.
> That left me with a puzzle — was he a rogue or a fool? was he trying to mislead careless readers who, by the time they had gotten to his response, had forgotten what my criticism was, or readers sufficiently committed to his side that they would assume what he wrote was true without bothering to check ... my post ...? Alternatively, is he so incapable of reading and understanding criticism that he confused [a tangential point made by somebody else], with my argument ...?
I have the same doubt frequently when arguing with people on the internet: is this person failing to make a rebuttal that's relevant to my argument because they genuinely failed to understand it? Or are they merely affecting incomprehension, either to frustrate me or in the hope that casual observers won't notice they haven't really addressed my critique?