Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

This can be seen in the exchange of text messages in Alex Taylor’s paper looking at 16-19 year olds in an English school. They send each other quite mundane messages, with their mobile phones, but what’s important is the reciprocity. They establish their peer networks and social status, inside their community, by who sent what to whom, and who replied. Taylor said it resembled descriptions of gift-giving cultures in Polynesia.

Instead, even under realistic accounts of how people argue, democratic argument will have cognitive benefits, and indeed can transform private vices (confirmation bias) into public virtues (the preservation of cognitive diversity)

It’s clear in retrospect that the existence of the Soviet empire was a spur to social democracy, in the United States and in Europe, because it was a serious competitor whose main selling point was generous social provision. The West had no choice but to compete.

We want to tell stories about dating and marriage and relationships and things that are human and emotional, but they’re going to be through our lens. We’re going to be telling a story of two people breaking up, one of them is going to be holding a gun on the other one on an airplane. It’s not going to just be a quiet conversation in a parked car as the rain beats on the windows.

What to you is a creepy, monocular, Cyclopean android-type thing is to many children a lovable, hilarious, uh, individual—that will comfort them at night.

Mills, like almost everyone in charge of London 2012, speaks of the Olympic brand with almost religious awe. Conversation on this topic often verges into humid, inadvertently revealing territory. One former committee member told me that the Olympic brand stands for “the world coming together to celebrate humanity…. In an Olympic Village, you see it. These are the most beautiful people in the world in the prime of their lives, dedicating their lives to excellence. And they’re all taut, and they’re all fit, and they’re all excited, you know. The youth of the world coming together to celebrate beauty and their athleticism. There’s a lot of shagging gets done in the Olympic Village. A lot of shagging, I’m telling you.

England is a perfectly nice little country, with many achievements to its credit. If you like to attend plays, want to read comic novels, hope to spare your skin the damaging effects of the sun, then England’s the place for you.

“I must congratulate you on doing a fantastic job building PayPal. My 14-year-old son is a very apathetic high school student and very much dislikes writing homework assignments. But he just wrote a beautiful e-mail to his friends about how PayPal was growing quickly, why they should sign up for it, and how they could take advantage of the referral structure that you put in place.”

On some level, this was a literary masterpiece. If nothing else, it was impressive for the many nested levels of conversation that were woven in. Other people were talking to other people about PayPal, possibly at infinite levels on down. The son was talking to other people about those people. Bill Gross was talking to his son. Then Gross was talking to Peter Thiel. And at the most opaque and important level, Gross was talking to the other investors at the table, tacitly playing up how smart he was for having invested in PayPal. The message is that sales is hidden. Advertising is hidden. It works best that way.

They conclude, “We found no evidence of publication bias in reports on publication bias.” But of course that’s the sort of finding regarding publication bias of findings on publication bias that you’d expect would get published.

(via felixsalmon)