Stuff I Found Interesting in February

1. Do longer prison sentences work? Find out here.

2. Already recommended this last month, but I am really enjoying the newsletters I’ve received from The Sample.

3. Apparently the US Government has a website encouraging everyone to write using plain language rather than jargon.

4. Leah Ypi’s lunch with the FT - ‘For me, Marx is neither a saint nor the enemy’.

5. A few worthwhile pieces on inflation - Harford, Tooze, and Claire Jones in Alphaville.

6. This piece on whether Facebook is a good stock to buy. Was published on February 9th so there may be a big change in stock price before this is published.

7. This game AI dungeon is really cool - like a classic dungeon text-based adventure game but made using AI! I guess lots of people have probably seen this before because it’s pretty popular, but I hadn’t, so maybe you’ll be one of today’s 10,000.

8. Words known better by males than females, and vice versa.

9. Some guy let his 6 year old daughter design his website, and it looks pretty good! Props to Kyra.

10. The Impactful Forecasting Prize that was set up by Eli Lifland and Misha Yagudin (with some help from me). You have until March 11th to enter!

11. This Rembrandt painting in ultra-high resolution (717,000 MP Scan). I recommend zooming in on random parts of the painting to see how high the resolution is.

12. Holden Karnofsky’s Defending One-Dimensional Ethics

13. I’ve been using Elicit as a good alternative to Google Scholar for some research I’ve been doing. The results aren’t necessarily better than Google scholar, but they’re often different (which is helpful for finding new papers) and the fact it uses GPT-3 is cool.

14. This 1991 Hitchens-Heston debate on the Gulf War.

15. The Trojan Horse Affair Podcast has been generating some controversy in the UK, but is very interesting. Sceptical listening is advised.

16. For people interested in forecasting only, this paper by Nuño Sempere and Alex Lawsen on perverse incentives for forecasters is interesting.

17. On the (not very strong) evidence that exercise is helpful for depression.

18. Tyler Cowen on Pet Sounds.

19. Cummings on Tolstoy [paywalled], and Jonathan Glover on morality and Anna Karenina.

20. Twitter thread + RCT on effect of eliminating fees and fines for people who committed minor crimes.

21. You might be familiar with Tonibler already.

22. With everything moving so fast there might be a better Russia/Ukraine piece to link to by the time goes out, but this piece by Jeremy Cliffe on the implications of Russian invasion is good.

23. Leonard Barden, the Guardian’s chess writer, is apparently 92 years old and retired from competitive chess in 1964 - before my mother was born!

24. On Tyler Cowen’s knack for finding talent.

25. What happens when you train senior civil servants in econometrics? Read here.