Thinking Complete

I've been listening to quite a few podcast episodes lately, particularly Rationally Speaking, the 80000 Hours podcast, EconTalk and Conversations with Tyler (who runs the excellent Marginal Revolution economics blog ). I was very impressed by a Rationally Speaking episode with Dr Herculano-Houzel, a brain researcher (here's my blog post about it ), as well as the 80,000 Hours episode with Anders Sandberg. Anders does a wide range of very creative and original research; here he was talking about hibernating aliens , interstellar warfare , and how quick colonising the universe could be . I'd previously seen these arguments as intellectually fun but fairly irrelevant. But on the podcast, Anders presented them in a new light: not simply as speculations on what aliens might be doing, but also as a way of exploring strategies that humans might want to use in the far future. Now that I think about it, that does seem pretty important. I've finally written some political blog

Since I've now been lucky enough to attend both Oxford and Cambridge, I thought it'd be interesting to compare and contrast the two. Bear in mind that I only spent one year in Cambridge, and that graduate students' experiences differ significantly from those of undergrads. Also note that there are many aspects of Oxford and Cambridge which are practically indistinguishable, and so I've skipped over most of those similarities. Nevertheless, here are some comparisons which have stuck in my mind - and which might help you decide (in the words of the particularly obnoxious Boat Race slogan) " which blue are you? " Geographic differences Oxford is a bigger city than Cambridge, with its suburbs stretching out much further. In Oxford, students who live outside the city center in places like Cowley or Summertown are surrounded by shops, bars and restaurants; whereas in Cambridge, they'd be surrounded by quiet residential neighbourhoods or paddocks. Since stud

The easiest and most neglected way to make people in the developed world much better off is to fix housing policy. Record high property prices in thousands of major cities are burying people under crushing debt, crippling social mobility, and providing fuel for class divisions and xenophobia. And all of this could be easily avoided! I’ll explain how shortly (with particular reference to London and San Francisco, which are the examples I’m most familiar with, and which showcase widespread problems) but first let’s look at just how bad the crisis is ( graphs from The Economist ). In Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, average house prices have roughly tripled over the last 30 years. This is in real terms, adjusted for inflation; and it's in spite of whatever progress has occurred in construction techniques or materials. This is hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the average person's pocket, a vast and overwhelming expense. And it's even worse than that. Con