Spencer Starr's an Intellectual Superstarr

09/01/2026

"Our forebears who worked and sacrificed tirelessly in their hopes their descendants would one day be free, comfortable, healthy, and educated, might be dismayed to observe how acidly we deny we are now these things." ~ Gregg Easterbrook

09/01/2026

"The more things improve, the louder become the exclamations about their badness. When problems, from mistreatment of women, to literacy, to poverty are serious, people take them for granted. As conditions improve, the public believes ever more strongly that things have never been worse.

Yet while elevation, both mental and physical, of the masses, is going on far more rapidly than ever before; while the lowering of the death rate proves that the average life is less trying, there swells louder and louder, the cry that the evils are so great that nothing short of a social revolution can cure them." ~ Herbert Spencer

08/01/2026

"Just as religious conviction is impervious to logical argument and indeed, does not result from logical processes; just as nationalist devotion or personal affection denies a mountain of evidence, so my pro-Soviet attitude attained complete independence from day-to-day events." ~ Luis Fisher

08/01/2026

"The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie." ~ Joseph Schumpeter

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." ~ Richard Feynman

07/01/2026

Great book review and article!

Interesting quote from it:
"Immigrants and natives didn’t have a partisan difference until the 1980s, and the partisan difference comes from immigrants being more likely to identify as independent, not from being more likely to identify as Democrat.

This is interesting but doesn’t address the tail risk of immigration leading to a dysfunctional level of polarisation or backlash. It’s probably the case that the biggest harms from immigration come from people irrationally panicking about immigration, but (surprise!) people are in fact irrational."

Edit: I now have a comment response post for this post on my personal website. …

19/12/2025

19/12/2025

Tremendous article!

Economic forces matter more than appearances

18/12/2025

I really hope Noah Smith is right about India in this article:

A lot of people doubt that India can develop. I'll take the other side of that bet.

18/12/2025

Good concise article, I had never heard of the Penn Effect before (at least not by name anyway)

Caplan and Candor

17/12/2025

There is a difference between having that feeling in your chest and/or your gut that you are right and actually knowing that you are right for in an epistemologically sound manner.

But by definition almost, most people automatically unthinkingly conflate that primal feeling for the knowledge state. It's interesting, I took multiple epistemology, philosophy of science, and methodology courses in college, but none of them ever bothered to mention anything about this feeling.

Maybe modern philosophers are just in denial that most people don't think very deeply very often, and worse, most people often confuse feeling with thinking.

10/12/2025

Incredible talk!

Heterodox Academy Research SymposiumHeld on February 23, 2024, at the Stanford Faculty ClubCreator of the “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” formula for risk communic...