Initial Reaction to Matrix Resurrections

I watched Matrix Resurrections last week, and wanted to talk about it. Reason Magazine has a good review which describes it as a "bizarre think piece on the movie's legacy". I agree with this, as the movie straight-up parodies the process of creating big-budget franchise reboots. To briefly summarize, in Resurrections, Neo (AKA Thomas Anderson) …

Reflections on January 6th

It appears, by inciting a mob to storm the Capitol building, Trump may have gone too far. I want to put out a hot take, because I fear it will be easy to forget, as the years go by, the aura of invulnerability that Trump had until about 3:00 this afternoon. For four years, it …

A Practical Guide to Estimating COVID-19 Travel Risk

I. Introduction I've had a lot of conversations with friends about traveling over the holidays. There have also been articles written about the risk of traveling. Of course, at the end of the day, people need to make their own decisions, but how are they supposed to do that? How are regular people supposed to …

Reflections on Kellogg Biotech Case Competition

Back in January, I had the privilege of participating in the Kellogg Biotech Case competition (link). It was the first time I've participated in a case competition, and although this is a touch overdue, I wanted to share my reflections on the experience, particularly my thoughts on the methodology, now that I have the benefit …

Social Science should be Funny

A popular theory is that humor is created by the violation of expectation, or "incongruity". For example, take a pun. When a veterinarian's office adopted a pig, they named him Chris P. Bacon. This caused a news anchor to lose his shit, and it was amazing. According to incongruity theory, the name Chris P. Bacon …

Kicking off the MBA Diary

I Just over two months ago, I started an MBA program at the Yale School of Management. I started the MBA program for reasons that I’ve come to learn are fairly common: I wasn’t satisfied with my career, and the MBA seemed like the best way to pivot, given that I possess only the vaguest …

A productive post on productivity

I've been grappling with an issue at work-- I think I care about the ability to communicate effectively more than other people, and yet I feel like I struggle more with it than they do. Here, the obvious explanation is probably correct: that I suffer from a form of "performance anxiety", which is to say that …

On Game of Thrones, Season 8

As of tonight, the phenomenon that is Game of Thrones can be evaluated in its entirety, and I wanted to take the chance to get down a hot take. My focus is not on the final episode, but the one previous, since it contained the the last significant plot development. Tonight's episode is spent managing …

Russia Hacked the Election!

Well, no, not really. The story, as far as I can tell, is that unnamed sources in the CIA believe that Russian agents hacked the emails of prominent Democrats and made their contents public in order to influence the election. Even if 100% true, to call this “hacking the election” is profoundly misleading, and would …

Ambiguity and Politics: Part 1

Although it is often called an optical illusion, this well-known image of a rabbit/duck technically isn't. Optical illusions are images designed to trick your visual systems into perceiving something that isn't there, such as motion in a static image. By contrast, the rabbit-duck is an ambiguous image. It plays with your head because it can …