1. Nate Silver on the political impact of the shutdown. Absent a crisis, it doesn't look like it will be significant for midterm elections.
2. Larry Summers insults Peter's 20 under 20 fellowship. Larry Summers isn't thinking hard enough about what the program is designed to do. If he did, he wouldn't be so quick to criticize it.
3. A transcript of Tyler Cowen's talk about thinking in stories. I've linked the talk in the past, but the following lines need to be re-emphasized often:
"As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you're telling a good vs. evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more...
...what kind of stories should we be suspicious of? Again, I'm telling you it's the stories that you like the most, that you find the most rewarding, the most inspiring."
While thinking in stories on the margin is probably a mistake, the interesting implication is also about how telling stories can make those around the storyteller turn off their brains temporarily. It's probably why almost every highly regarded academic or executive has a few go to stories that they refine and tell over and over again - it's very effective.
4. Robin Hanson is praising profanity. The theory is that profanity helps vent aggression, gauge emotional toughness and helps groups figure out when they are pushing people up to or beyond their limits.
"So it makes sense that today profanity is more common in work groups that depend closely on one another, and who have high levels of physical and emotional stress....
...I take recent increases in campus speech codes that basically ban any talk that anyone might offend anyone as further evidence that schools are more about signaling status than about gaining productivity."