> Investing is the science and art of placing money where it does the most good
Err, no it isn't. It's the science and art of placing money where it will grow the most. That is neither equivalent nor synonymous with "does the most good".
I like how this meshes with Cal Newport's ideas on procrastination. As I understand it, he views procrastination as the mind's natural tendency to avoid things it doesn't trust: that crappy plan you came up with for getting that project done? Yeah, you don't trust it, so why would you actually try to implement it?
I would argue that a portion of that is simply the way you view things. I would also argue that you could eek out control like the method by which you choose to meet your deadlines.
That link makes the unfounded assumption that the poor choose to be poor. If you assume that the poor choose to be poor, then it is easy to see that there are situations in which it's rational to choose to try to live off welfare. From that perspective it makes perfect sense to want to make the lives of poor people even more miserable so they'll choose to stop being so poor...
Also, don't forget that Clinton ended welfare as we know it, resulting in fixed periods of welfare anyway. It also resulted in some evils, like single mothers working 6 hours a day (with their kids in a daycare) making less money and spending less time raising their children.
I think the final line (heavily edited) "it is rational not to work as long as work opportunities pay less than $30k/year" is what we should focus on: let's try to make their work opportunities better through extra services (maybe mandatory without a waiver of disability or insanity) that give training and education.
I disagree, I'd vastly prefer a good episode 3 than an early episode 3. Valve has always sacrificed time for quality, and it's the sacrifice that allows them to be great.
Life expectancy is going up due to a variety of factors: better trauma care, better vaccination regimes, better sanitation, better nutrition, some better treatments (some amazingly so).
Nevertheless, a large fraction of medical screens and procedures does not improve average life expectancy when people actually try to measure their impact. Intensive end-of-life care does not improve life expectancy when similarly measured.
not just life expectancy in toto which you would rightly expect to have a huge number of variables that interact in unknown ways. many medical procedures have proven to be directly detrimental to health in double blind studies yet remain standard procedure.
But easily revised to "Do you want to come with us?"
Not that I particularly think the rules are inviolable. I see them as guidelines: if you're using the passive voice then make sure that it won't be better in active. If you're ending with a preposition, then perhaps there's a clearer way to phrase it.
Knowledgable readers who care will likely know both standards; at that point it's a matter of consistency (or, at the very least, never do something that breaks both sets of rules).
"There are dozens of disciplines where virtually every single scientific consensus in the entire field has been overturned."
You seem to be arguing that since mankind once thought the world was flat and was wrong, and then mankind thought the world was round and was wrong (more oblate spheroidal), and then mankind thought the world was oblate spheroidal and was wrong, we definitely can't trust the scientific consensus that the world is approximately oblate spheroidal with a very slight bulge south of the equator. Indeed, maybe the earth will turn out to be cubical tomorrow, and a taurus the day after that.
"Wrong" is a relative statement. Saying the earth is flat is more wrong than saying the earth is a sphere, and saying the earth is a sphere is more wrong than saying the earth is oblate spheroidal. Yes they're all wrong, just as newtonian mechanics was, strictly speaking, "wrong", yet no one looks at a car and says "that was built using newtonian mechanics, and therefore can't possibly work".
Err, no it isn't. It's the science and art of placing money where it will grow the most. That is neither equivalent nor synonymous with "does the most good".